


the nature of the beast

by notavodkashot



Series: all of me and all of you sit down quietly in the dark [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: ...sort of, Alternate Universe - Werewolf, Animal Traits, Animal Transformation, Berserkers, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Mutual Pining, Occasional orgies among friends, Politics, Slow Burn, being human is hard, idk man it's weird all around
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-26
Updated: 2019-01-27
Packaged: 2019-02-06 22:34:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 38,776
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12827544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notavodkashot/pseuds/notavodkashot
Summary: Being human is a lot more than justlookinghuman.Or, the weird, pseudo-werewolf, pseudo-berserker AU that no one asked for, but that won't let me sleep at night.





	1. the marshal of the crownsguard

* * *

_i. the marshal of the crownsguard_

* * *

Nyx hadn't exactly volunteered to go to the mainland. 

None of them had, really. The mainland was a nebulous, foreign concept none of them really thought about that often. And why would they? Galahd was Lucian in name only, and they liked it that way. The mainline brought idiots every couple years, with grand plans and ideas to “modernize the islands” and “bring them into a new era”, and it was funny watching them set out to try, only to be inevitably worn down by the storms. A few succeeded – Galahd did not, in fact, live in the past, technology-wise, but their cities were still more towns than anything else – but most of the mainlanders that came into the islands eventually left, their metaphorical tails tucked between their legs, ran out by rain, lightning and the certainty that nothing in Galahd changed. Not really. Not long term. 

Then the war had started, in earnest, over something or another Galahd had not really known much about, and suddenly the Nilfs were there, coming in even more arrogant than the usual mainlanders, with their MTs and their armors and their generators. 

Galahd did not have the technology to fight them in their terms. 

So they hadn't. 

Then Galahd had gained reknown as the Unconquerable, when the Nilfs had been sent packing, none of their shiny, fancy tech a match for an army of whiskers and stripes and fur thick enough to be bullet-proof. They'd drank about it and made rude jokes and then they'd moved on and gone back to their daily lives, because they were Galahdian, and nothing mattered more than the now. 

The now, however, was the fact the King had requested aid, because Galahd was Lucian at least in name, and their victory was his too, in a way. 

It was annoying. 

But when they asked Nyx if he'd consider going, Selena had grinned and shoved him forward, and if Nyx was going, then Libertus was going too. Nyx supposed it was alright. There were another three with them: a girl from Aeolus, named Crowe, that grinned easily and befriended Libertus three words in, and two men from Aura, Pelna and Axis, who seemed to know each other almost as well as Nyx and Libertus did. 

They set out without much ceremony, scheduled to meet a man by the name of Titus Drautos once they hit the mainland. Pelna volunteered to drive the boat, and they sat on the open deck, enjoying the breeze and playing cards as they got to know each other better. It wouldn't really matter, once they were out in the field, but they were about to plunge themselves into a strange land full of stuck up, strange people, and closing ranks around each other seemed like the smart move. 

Titus Drautos turned out to be a stern-faced giant of a man that tried his best to not look disappointed when he realized Galahd's answer to their King's request for aid was five people dressed in casual, rugged clothes and not carrying anything more deadly than a few knives. Nyx thought he was hilarious, and slid into the role of leader of their small group when none of the others did. They didn't need a leader, not really, but mainlanders were weird about that kind of thing. 

Mainlanders were weird about everything, it turned out. 

Their city was large and expansive, and it gave Crowe a headache with the cacophony of smells and the distinct lack of that sweet, tangy rain they were used to. They bowed and fussed about little stupid things, like who walked in first and who sat where. And the food was bland and borderline tasteless, which was really the thing that made them sit together in the open, large living room of the shared quarters they'd been given – they had, somehow, become a diplomatic envoy, between meeting Titus and actually reaching the Citadel at the heart of Insomnia, which was so hilarious they had to play along just to see how far the mainlanders were willing to take things – and seriously consider calling the whole thing off. 

“Let's meet the King at least,” Nyx proposed, sitting on the back of the couch, watching the others as they sprawled around the low table and the sincere if not very enticing meal they'd been offered for lunch. “If he's a dick we can just fuck off then.” 

“No wonder they're losing the war,” Axis muttered a little snidely, picking unenthusiastically at a tray of delicately arranged folds of meat that looked baked, rather than grilled like it was good and proper. “These people are so...” 

“Soft,” Crowe snorted, when he trailed off trying to find the suitable word. She popped a cherry tomato into her mouth, rolling her eyes. “Wouldn't last a day out, back home.” 

“Suppose that's why we're here,” Libertus muttered into a glass of wine, “you'd think they'd have sent us out as soon as we got here, from the tone of their request.” 

“Yeah, but they have all these hoops they have to jump through,” Nyx mused, thinking back of the stuffy, awkward dinner the night prior, where he'd spent good two hours sitting opposite Titus at the table and talking mostly about the protocol in the upcoming days. “They don't actually seem to know why the King called for us, or what we are.” Nyx's lips twitched in amusement at the memory of Titus trying his best to pry without seeming like he was doing so. “So maybe that's got to do with it. The King might be different.” 

“I suppose we will find out,” Pelna sighed. “It works to our advantage if they really don't know, though. Makes it easier to leave.” 

* * *

The King did know. 

Nyx knew it the moment he laid eyes on him, the way his expression shifted ever so slightly from stern command to something almost like quiet awe. They didn't kneel, and the King did not ask them to, even if one of the men standing behind him looked quietly constipated about it. Nyx found himself distracted not by him, but by the other one. He reminded him of Titus, a bit, stern faced and serious, standing at attention with an expression that betrayed nothing. But there was something to him, to the sharpness of his jaw and the cool intensity of his eyes, that Nyx found far more interesting than even the King's overwhelming presence. 

“I apologize,” the King said, after a moment, once the perfunctionary ceremony and announcements were done. “You must be eager to set out.” 

“Little bit,” Nyx replied, because there was power in the King, a certain dignity that didn't make them chafe, when they looked at him. “We appreciate the hospitality, Your Majesty, but we're not really used to the Lucian way.” 

“Galahd is Lucis,” the King replied, a small twitch of his lips hinting at a smile, “as much as some of my court is fond of forgetting it. Thus the Galahdian way should also be the Lucian way.” Nyx arched an eyebrow at that, but didn't say anything, as the King tilted his head slightly sideways. “Perhaps upon your return, you could take time to teach the court some of it.” 

Libertus snorted loudly and irreverently. Nyx caught the tail end of a smirk, on that fascinating man's face, before he settled his features into stone again. 

“We're here as long as it pleases you, Your Majesty,” Nyx said with a small shrug. “So perhaps we could give it a shot. Don't really think the mainland is ready for it, though.” 

“Small steps, Nyx Ulric,” the King said, “are often all that takes for great works to start. Galahd has been away too long, it would be good if Lucis as a whole remembered its place.” 

“We'll see,” Nyx said, refusing to commit to it entirely, but not dismissing the notion. Kings had made such grandiose statements before, about Galahd, but nothing had really come from it. Nothing really changed, in Galahd, and nothing really changed in Lucis, it seemed. “You understand, of course, what is it we do.” 

“I do,” the King replied, nodding thoughtfully. “I am surprised so many of you have chosen to answer the call,” he added, and Nyx noted the way Titus shifted, surprised. Five soldiers clearly were not very impressive to him, but then, he didn't know what Galahdian soldiers _were_. “What will you need?” 

“Targets and supplies, mostly,” Nyx replied easily, shrugging again. “You tell us what you want dead, Your Majesty, and we'll do the rest.” 

“We're very good,” Libertus added, eyes dark and bloodthirsty, hungry for a good fight, “at making things dead.” He paused a bit, as if considering. “Your Majesty.” 

The King smiled, then. An actual smile. The men behind him looked indifferent and confused, respectively. Nyx wondered absently what would make mystery indifferent man look alive. 

“So I've come to understand, yes.” He turned to that man, precisely, motioning with an arm for him to step forward. He was very graceful on his feet, with none of the stiff command that Titus carried himself. “This is Cor Leonis, Marshal of the Crownsguard.” Mystery man – Cor, Nyx supposed – inclined his head slightly, but said nothing. “He's agreed to be your liason, in light of your... unique abilities.” 

Nyx arched an eyebrow, not quite sure how to reply to that. 

Cor snorted dryly. 

“He's trying to be polite about the fact I'm going to be there to keep you in line,” he said tonelessly, staring at Nyx right in the eye and completely ignoring the King's exhasperated sigh or their third companion spluttering. 

“You're gonna keep us in line,” Nyx said, one eyebrow arched. “As in, out there? In the field?” 

Cor arched an eyebrow back, completely unruffled. 

“I am exceedingly good at being not dead,” he said, and the King's other escort gave up pretenses and buried his face in his hands. 

Nyx decided he liked this man, unruffled and blunt as he was. Which probably meant he'd be somewhat sad to see him dead, once he inevitably got himself mauled out there. 

“It's your funeral, pal,” Nyx replied, smiling with a shrug. 

The smile widened against his will, when Cor merely offered the ghost of a smirk, and shrugged right back at him. 

“I have utmost faith in the Marshal's abilities to keep up with you and your comrades, Nyx,” the King said, looking like he wanted to shake his head and barely resisting. “He's... very unique, as well, in his own way.” 

“Shut up, Regis,” Cor deadpanned, looking back at the King with an arched eyebrow. He turned his gaze back to Nyx. “Will you be ready to leave by tomorrow?” 

Nyx considered a taunting quip, but he needed to chew on the fact this was a man capable of and allowed to talk back to the King at his leisure. 

“Sure,” he said instead, tone almost friendly, “any time you want to go?” 

“Six sharp will do,” Cor replied, then shrugged again when Nyx nodded. “Good day, gentlemen.” He paused, stared at Crowe for a second, and added: “Lady.” There was a lengthier pause, full of meaning that Nyx didn't understand. “Regis. Clarus.” 

And then he was gone, strolling off with that near-glide of his, steps light and purposeful at once. Nyx didn't stare, but it was a near thing. 

* * *

Cor drove them out of the Crown City and across the massive bridge that connected Cavaugh with Leide just as the sun began to rise in the distance. The mood in the van was strained, but not as badly as it'd been, that first drive with Titus into the Citadel. Cor had them on edge, simply because he was quiet and kept to himself and the road. He wasn't as ostentatious as the nobles they'd endured and entertained in the days since their arrival. So it was hard to gauge how to best handle him. He didn't really try to engage them, either, offering quiet, blunt statements here and there, and then mostly keeping out of the way to let them do their thing. Nyx sat shotgun, staring at the dry, dusty landscape so different from home, and told himself it was for the best. 

The man was nice to look at, sure, but he definitely wasn't going to be, if he was stupid enough to follow them into the actual fight. Which he apparently was going to do. 

“So how did they rope you into this job?” Nyx asked him, after spending most of the day mulling on whether to ask or not, as they crossed over into Duscae, early in the evening. “Pissed off someone you shouldn't?” There was a small pause as Cor gave him a quick glance, before fixing his eyes back on the road. Nyx grinned. “ _Fucked_ someone you shouldn't?” 

“Regis asked,” Cor replied, shrugging “though there isn't anyone else who could come with you.” He paused, frowning. “If the legends are true.” 

He didn't sound dismissive. Nyx was surprised to recognize the tone as... hopeful, almost. 

“They are,” he replied lightly, casually, like it was really no big deal at all. “Which is really why you shouldn't-” 

“Your concern is unnecessary,” Cor interrupted, not rude, not entirely, but also quite final about it. “You have a job to do, and so do I.” 

Nyx frowned, but shrugged. 

“Your funeral, not mine,” he said, again, and set out to stare at the side of the road instead. 

* * *

It took them another four days to reach the outpost in Cleigne. Cor was quiet and kept out of the way, but his presence was impossible to ignore. Nyx mused on the fact it was a good thing, then, that they didn't really need to gel well in combat, to be effective. They'd be shit soldiers, otherwise. 

Their target was a large, open space chock full of ships and MTs miling about, setting up the skeleton of a base, about two days away from the outpost they'd left the van in. Nyx had seen them try something similar, back home, but they'd never gotten as far as getting cimentation done, there. 

“Last warning to stay behind,” Nyx insisted, one eyebrow arched as they waited for dusk in the small camp they'd set up, just out of sight from the construction site. 

Cor stared at him for a moment before he turned his eyes to Libertus and arched his eyebrows. 

“Does he ever shut up?” He asked, deadpan, and smirked just a little when Libertus snorted, despite his best intentions. 

“Sometimes,” Libertus replied gruffly, ignoring Nyx's vaguely wounded look. “But he's right about this. You're gonna die out there, you realize.” 

“We literally can't stop,” Crowe pipped in, shrugging. “Not until it's over.” 

Cor rolled his eyes. 

There was a moment of profound silence as they tried to decide how offended they were about it, but then he snorted. 

“If you actually kill me,” Cor said, arching both eyebrows as he summoned his sword to his hand, “I will be very impressed.” 

It was Axis who turned first. Axis had the shortest fuse of all of them and a particular disdain for all things Lucian. Nyx watched it happen, and thought that Cor couldn't have possibly known that what he was doing was essentially pour gasoline over that fuse, before setting himself on fire and rolling all over it, in the process. It would be quick, at least, Nyx thought a little emptily; it was always quick. Axis' body shifted as he stood, the magic buzzling in the air, sickly sweet and taunting, making their blood boil in sympathy. Pelna's hair was getting whiter, washing out into stripes from one heartbeat to the next. Crowe's eyes glowed and the last thing Nyx remembered, properly, was Libertus' snarling as Cor stayed where he was, standing before them like he was not about to be mauled by five, fully-grown coeurls. 

Then the beast took hold, properly, and Nyx faded entirely from his own body. 

* * *

When Nyx next became aware of himself, he found himself in something's mouth, as the fur and the rage subsided and he shrunk back into the scope of his own bones. 

That had never happened before, he was fairly sure. The coeurl was territorial and with more than healthy self-preservation: if he was under attack by something, the rage would have kept the beast going – and going, and going, for days and even weeks if it needed to, he remembered the year the Empire fled Galahd, when Nyx spent more days on four legs than on two – until the threat dissipated enough for the coeurl to fold back under his skin, or he was dead. 

He was not supposed to wake up as himself, his torso resting on a warm, wiggling tongue, with fangs as long as his entire arm, wrist to shoulder, casually half closed over his body. Nyx did the sensible thing and squirmed, and then he had the indignity of getting spat on the ground by whatever it was that had captured him. 

It was a wolf. 

Well, it looked like one, at least, but wolves in Galahd were the size of overgrown work dogs, not _modest trucks_. Nyx knew he was large, when he changed, the average Galahdian coeurl was twenty-five feet long and proportionally sized. Even if Libertus joked about him being the runt in their village, coeurls were not, by nature, small animals. This was something else. This looked like a wolf proportioned to take down a kujata the same way wolves back home were proportional to take down deer. It was huge and limber, black fur shiny and thick with the promise of softness. It looked almost scrawny, limbs long but strong. 

It was also licking the ground, as if scrapping the taste of him off its tongue. Nyx felt weirdly offended about that. 

“Holy shit, you're okay!” Crowe said, snapping him out of his contemplation just as Libertus' entire bulk collided with his body, pulling him into a hug. 

Nyx returned it one armed, and felt slightly weirded out that no one seemed to care there was a wolf the size of a small hill less than twenty feet away. Maybe he was the only one who could see it. But no, as Pelna and Axis approached, they were also cautiously skirting around, trying not to get too close. The wolf had by then moved on from licking the floor and had, instead, flopped down, lying halfway turned on its side, and letting its head fall on his front paws. Except for the bit of how fucking huge it was, it looked almost like a dog settling in to rest. 

“Uh,” Nyx said eloquently, blinking. “That's-” 

“That's Cor,” Axis said irritably, nodding at the beast that was now studying them with intelligent, blue eyes the size of Nyx's head. 

“What,” Nyx deadpanned. 

“That's Cor,” Crowe confirmed, as they all stood there a moment, staring at the vision of fur and... familiar indifference. “I wouldn't believe it either, but we all saw him explode into fur. Fursplode, if you will.” 

The wolf made a low, growling noise in the back of its – his? – throat, as if to show disapproval over Crowe's choice of nomenclature. Crowe grinned at him, tilting her chin up. 

“We'd all shifted back,” Pelna said, nodding his head in the direction of the would-be base, now a smoking wreck in the distance, a good half-mile away. “You were almost there and then one of those armor people shot you, and sent you back into the rage again. You chased after him, and Cor chased after you and... we followed him, but you were getting too close to the farm, so he stopped you.” Pelna gave the wolf a cautious, borderline reverent look. “He just... _stopped_ you.” 

“He fursploded,” Crowe insisted, and laughed when the wolf whined irritably in reply. “And then he stopped you.” 

“Shit,” Nyx replied eloquently, well aware he was going to need to get really drunk before he processed everything properly. “So what now?” 

The wolf yawned, showing off those fangs of his – they really were the size of Nyx's arms, each, white and sharp and probably strong enough to crush through anything – and stretched. It stretched like a dog, front paws along the ground and back arched as it stood up on its hindlegs. Then it shook itself, releasing a small cloud of shiny, black fur and nodded sharply in the general direction back to camp. 

“...you're not gonna change back?” Libertus asked, frowning mightily. 

Cor stared him down with an expression that could only be described as deadpan. Which was honestly kind of impressive, considering they hadn't known what deadpan looked like, on a wolf's face. 

It was a little terrifying, though, the way his eyes were so _clear_ . Like he was really, 100% in control of himself. That didn't happen, back home. That wasn't like _them_. They gave into the rage and the fear and the violence and the coeurl took over, and when they came out of the other side everything else was dead except themselves. There was meaning and reason behind Cor's movements, despite his current appearance. They watched with fascination – and profound annoyance, in Axis' case, but Axis was profoundly annoyed by basically everything, always – as Cor started to walk lazily back towards camp, and then stopped at the edge of the clearing when they weren't following. 

“...okay,” Nyx said eventually, choking on a laugh, and then started walking after him. “Fuck it, why not.” 

* * *

Cor did not change back, when they got to camp. 

He did not change back for the two days it took them to trek back to the van, in fact. He disappeared occasionally, along the way, which was frankly terrifying, when one considered he was at least twenty thousand pounds of fur, claws and fangs. He wasn't supposed to be able to vanish like that, disappearing into the treeline and then coming back hours later, muddled or bloodied or _something_. 

It was going to drive Nyx crazy. 

On the upside, the rest of the group was cozing up to him fairly quickly. Crowe amused herself making very terrible puns at him – some of which were heinous enough to cause one of the aforementioned, creepy vanishing spells – and asking questions Cor had no right way to answer, without an actual human mouth. Libertus joined in with Crowe, dragged by the sheer magnetism of her personality, and played along by having one-sided conversations with the majestically deadpan-looking wolf. Pelna found the whole thing amusing, so of course Axis allowed himself to not overtly hate it, which was pretty magnanimous, considering this was Axis and despite their short time knowing each other, Nyx had the absolute, cold-blooded certainty that Axis Arra could, would and absolutely had murdered someone out of sheer annoyance before. Multiple times, even. 

When they did reach the van, stashed away in an abandoned barn, Cor shook his body and stretched languidly one last time, before he began to shrink back into a human shape. 

They stared a little, because that human shape did not, in fact, include clothes. 

“Oh,” Nyx said, watching the man stroll towards the van without a care in the world, “that's inconvenient.” 

Cor paused, in the middle of pulling the van's trunk open and gave him a dry look. 

“Immensely.” He pointed a finger at Crowe's general direction, but did not bother to look at her. “Do not.” 

“I haven't even said anything yet,” she replied, eyebrows arched tauntingly. 

“I believe you've said enough,” Cor deadpanned back, offering a sullen glare when she grinned at him. He shook his head and dug around the trunk of a small bag with spare clothes. He was still very much naked and Nyx might or might not be still very much staring at him for it. A little bit. “So far.” 

“Wait, so you _can_ understand when you're talked to,” Pelna asked, blinking. Cor stared at him. It was a pretty damn impressive stare, considering he was in the process of slipping on a pair of pants. Pelna coughed. “I mean, of course you understand when you're talked to. I meant, when you're... You know.” 

“Fursploded,” Crowe interjected, grinning when it made Cor hiss an irritated breath at her. 

“Can I pay you to never say that again?” He muttered, adjusting his pants, and Nyx was absolutely not distracted in the least, by the fact he wasn't wearing underwear beneath them. “I will pay you to never say that again." 

“No,” Crowe replied, smirking. “I was there when it happened. It literally murdered your clothes. That's called a fursplosion and I'll accept no other term.” 

Cor placed his hands on his lower back, arched it until it cracked, and then rolled his eyes. 

“Yes, Pelna,” he said, opting to ignore Crowe entirely, “I can understand when I'm talked to, regardless of the amount of fur I'm currently wearing.” He paused. “You can't?” 

Heads shook all around him as he slipped on socks, sitting at the edge of the van's open trunk and frowning. 

“We are what we are,” Libertus explained with a shrug. “We're human when we're human, and we're coeurls when we're coeulrs. Coeurls are smart, but they're not interested in understanding humans.” He frowned. “Why do you think we kept telling you to stay away?” 

“Dramatics, mostly,” Cor snorted, shaking his head. “You did not attack, once you turned. Not me, anyway. I thought that was intentional.” 

There was a moment of silence as they contemplated that nugget of information. Coeurls were vicious creatures, and not likely to spare a single man standing so close by. There were a lot of implications as to why their animal senses would have chosen not to engage Cor, and none of them were particularly reassuring. 

“You realize we could have cleared up all misunderstandings, if we had had a proper mission briefing before setting out,” Axis pointed out, frowning darkly at Cor. “You lot enjoy your ceremonious bullshit too much to skip that for no reason.” 

Cor shrugged as he put on his boots and tied up the laces methodically. He allowed them to stew on that point for a moment longer as he slid a t-shirt over his head, and then sat back on the edge of the trunk so his feet were not touching the ground. 

“The Citadel is compromised,” he said, shrugging at their stares. “Someone has been leaking intelligence to the Nilfs about the war efforts. Realistically, it must be more than one person, considering the amount of interference we've been running into so far.” Cor sighed. “So after much thought, the King decided to try and fight the war on two fronts. He called on Galahd for aid, because he knew what your people are capable of, and how you fight your wars. While General Drautos is to focus on the overt operations and continue with the effort as we have, so far, I am to lead the actual efforts to push the Empire back to their borders. Needless to say, my... condition is not common knowledge in Insomnia. Neither is the significance of you being Galahdian.” He offered them a small, wry smile. “Such things are the realm of poetic metaphor and fairytales, or so I'm told.” 

“Huh,” Nyx said, frowning. 

“So this was just a test run?” Libertus asked, frowning. “What if we did actually kill you?” 

“As I said,” Cor replied, “I'd have been very impressed.” 

“And I guess, while we're out doing the actual fighting,” Crowe pointed out, “someone else will try and hunt down the traitors?” 

“Clarus will see to it,” Cor said, nodding. “So we may forego the ceremonious bullshit, as Axis said, and report nothing but lies to the Citadel and the King. The more ridiculous and inaccurate, the better.” 

“I like your King,” Axis said, smirking faintly. “The way he thinks, at least.” 

“What is the Empire after, anyway?” Pelna asked, tilting his head slightly to the side. He shrugged awkwardly when Cor stared at him. “We didn't really get the memo, before the Nilfs started popping up in our lands. We just kicked them out.” 

Cor snorted, folding his arms over his chest. 

“The Emperor does believe in fairytales,” he said, lips twitching with the impression of a snarl. “He wants the Crystal.” 

“But the Crystal was destroyed during the War for the Dawn,” Crowe said, blinking. “Everyone knows that.” 

Cor shrugged eloquently. 

“So what are we supposed to do?” Nyx asked, folding his arms over his chest. “What's our goal here? Make our way up to Gralea and beat sense into the Emperor?” 

“Stall for time, mostly,” Cor replied. “The Emperor might believe in fairytales, but that doesn't mean his people do. There's been considerable dissent among his citizenry about the war. And his council and the merchant guilds are not particularly pleased by it, either, so there are whispers of... disloyalty among his inner circle. The only thing that's kept him on the throne so far is the string of victories in the mainland, but the sound defeat in Galahd yielded interesting results, diplomatically speaking.” Cor shrugged. “If we take away those victories from him, the whisperers will do the rest.” 

“Lucis has a horse in that race, don't you,” Nyx said, and it wasn't a question. “To make sure whoever ends up sitting on that throne is not just another nutjob.” 

“I'm sure we do,” Cor snorted, “but I've never bothered to ask.” 

“So what?” Libertus asked, “we go out on these little roadtrips with you, fuck up some Imperial twats and then go back to Insomnia and tell them a fancy story about something else entirely? Until the Emperor gets himself shived in his sleep by his own people?” 

Cor nodded. 

“Pretty much.” 

* * *

It wasn't so bad. 

They stayed in the Citadel and amused themselves playing a game of tall stories with the court, trying to pinpoint how far they'd be allowed to go, before someone questioned their word. So far, the line was nowhere in sight. There was something ridiculously satisfying in making up hoops for stuck up Lords and Ladies to jump through, under the pretense of ' _that's how it's done, in Galahd_ '. They shared a large suite with a common living room in the Citadel, and they sat down to eat together, at least once a day, sharing food that was almost passable – Axis had yelled at someone about it, eventually – and keeping their stories straight. Half the suite was empty at night, and Nyx was happy for them, he really was, except when it came time to sleep alone in a bed far too large for one. They would have him, if he really wanted to, because that was the true way it was done in Galahd, where all you wanted was always just a question away. But he didn't want _them_. He didn't want Axis' temper or Pelna's patience or Crowe's taunting or Libertus' concern. So he didn't ask them and they didn't ask him, and he watched them pair up and smiled. He was happy for them. Really. He was. 

The real fun, though, was piling into a van and letting Cor drive them off into some remote corner of the map, and then spending a few days out camping and wrecking havoc for the Empire's benefit. It would be even better, in Nyx's personal opinion, if Cor would stick around as a human during the actual camping, but he'd taken to shift as soon as they left the van behind. Which... was cool, really, everyone seemed to be chill about it and Nyx himself had managed to stop being startled by how goddamn quiet he could be, despite the fact he shouldn't be able to, just by size alone. No one else seemed to question it, either, so Nyx was left alone to ponder on random minutia, like what exactly Cor ate during their little outings and just... stuff. Like just how comfortable he seemed to be, on four legs, lacking that quiet tension always present on the back of his neck, when he was human. Nyx tried to imagine feeling so comfortable inside the coeurl, and found he was a little jealous of the notion. It was either him or the coeurl, always, with no inbetween, and someone like Cor, who could just shift and retain his sense of self was just... unheard of, in Galahd. 

But then, for all they'd grown comfortable around the man, with or without the fur, Cor was not Galahdian. 

He was very much not Lucian either, though. He didn't have the mannerisms and the little quirks that were annoying about Lucians. He was just... _Cor_. Blunt and dry and deadpan, whether he was human or not, at the time. 

Nyx thought he was fascinating, but kept the thought mostly to himself because Libertus already gave him enough shit about his tendency, in his opinion, to stick his dick in crazy. Well, it didn't get any crazier than a broody, deadpan Lucian Marshal who spent most of their time together as a wolf the size of a bus. And he did, indeed, want to stick his dick right into that pot of crazy, but Cor didn't seem interested. The couple times Nyx had dropped somewhat blatant hints at him, they'd had sailed right above his head, which he supposed were Cor's polite way of letting him down without overtly punching his ego in the face. Or punching him in the face, actually. He appreciated it, he did, as he appreciated the fact Cor hadn't gotten weird about it, afterwards, and that he'd simply gone on as if nothing had ever happened. 

Nyx respected that, he did. 

He still stared a little, whenever Cor paraded about naked at the beginning or the end of their trips, but then, he was only human. 

He was also incredibly, stupidly masochistic, apparently, because on one of those rare occasions that he'd ran into Cor in the Citadel – Cor seemed to vanish entirely, between their little trips, except for those rare functions the King himself attended and which Cor spent standing behind him and looking long-suffering and bored – his poor attempt at small talk had ended somehow morphing into an offer to spar with him. 

Which was why Nyx found himself dreading and looking forward to Thursday afternoons and the two hours they spent rolling around training mats, pinning each other down. Cor fought dirty and Nyx fought dirtier, and it was ridiculously fun until he found himself lying down with a sword to his throat and two hundred pounds of Marshal smirking down at him. Then it was a very awkward game of dodging and trying his best to not let Cor figure out exactly how fun he found their little bounts. He was bound to get caught. It wasn't so much a possibility as a matter of time, but when he _did_ get caught, he had not gotten the reaction he'd expected. 

“Ah,” Cor said, staring down at Nyx with a tiny frown, as if figuring out something mundane, like what day it was. It was definitely not the expression of someone whose thigh was pressed hard and unforgiving between Nyx's legs, tempting him to rut against it. “I see. Excuse me.” 

Nyx watched him go, steps brisk but not enough to be considered running, and buried his face into his hands as he laughed. 

“ _Shit_.” 

* * *


	2. the king's hound

* * *

_ii. the king's hound_

* * *

Cor dreamed of the Cave and the Trial and the Blademaster. 

He dreamed of the war and Mors and the role he served, under the previous King. 

Dreaming memories was both better and worse than having nightmares. Better, because he always knew what was happening, and worse, because he knew how it ended. And it was always the end, too, haunting the edges of the dream, stalking him like prey. The stench of bile and fire, and the shrill cry of glass shattering, and then the weight of the dying King hanging off his back, his paws trying to dig into asphalt and finding no give, the shock traveling up and making his joints feel like they'd snap. He woke up with a snarl, caught between two conflicting memories trying to melt into one: magic on his skin, the blow that had ripped through his bones and torn them into a different shape, and the bite of bullets and shrapnel cutting through fur and bouncing off, over and over again, enough to leave an imprint despite it all. 

He was alone, which was almost unusual these days, after he'd been tasked with keeping the Galahdians in line. He was used to waking up under the weight of warm bodies that had loud voices and no real desire to keep their thoughts to themselves. Here, in the heart of Regis' hunting grounds, his sanctuary and his hideout, there was no one to comment on his reaction from the nightmare. So Cor snarled again, purposefully this time, lips pulled back to bare his fangs at nothingness, and shook himself awake almost spitefully. 

It was fine, after all. He was fine. Memories were memories and the thing about them, the one thing that really mattered, was the fact that he was done with them. He'd survived them, it was ludicrous to think he'd fall to mere ghost of them. 

Still, he tasted bone and blood under his tongue, the precise tang of human suffering coming to an abrupt, panicked end, and resisted the urge to lick the ground and clean his tongue of the memory of it. 

He stretched slowly, feeling every muscle twist and fall into place within the edges of his being, shuffling orderly where it belonged. And then he set out to walk the length of the land Regis had set aside for him, following paths worn by his own feet. There was nothing worthwhile to protect, in the grounds, but the land stretched like a crescent moon around and about the heart of Insomnia, walled off by a chain link fence that did nothing to keep out the smells of the city, the smells of the people. Cor had joked to Clarus, once, that it was his equivalent of reading the newspaper in the morning, these walks along the perimeter of the grounds, letting his nose read the state of the world around him. Clarus had not found it funny, and instead tasked himself with coming to the cabin and dropping the morning edition on the front steps, every day. Cor always timed his route to make sure they did not run into each other, unless Clarus decided to stick around and wait for him to come back. But then, if he did, that meant Cor was needed and it was all business. 

Cor could handle business alright, when it came to Clarus. It was everything else that he had trouble with, because Clarus was human to the marrow of his bones and Cor... was not. It was his primary personality flaw, that, his inability to handle the fact he was found wanting, in any respect. He tried and he tried, until he was good enough, strong enough. But he was never going to be human enough for Clarus' taste, and fifteen years in, Cor was too tired to even try. 

He found the paper neatly folded on the steps and the scent of Clarus fading already, by the time he finished his walk. He shifted as he approached, body shrinking and twisting as his entire being folded back into human shape. Cor wiggled his toes against the moist grass, dew digging into the soles of his feet, and re-centered himself as his balance shifted. The world was duller, like this, less smells and fainter sounds, but also brighter with colors he never really noticed were missing until he got them back. The wooden steps were rough and solid under his weight, and he leaned down to pick the paper and then stepped into the cabin, pushing the unlocked door with the back of his free hand as he peered at the front page with an indolent frown. 

The cabin was small, distributed into only two distinct spaces: a small bathroom and a single room cluttered everywhere with rugs and books and knickknacks he'd picked up along the years, with the makings of a kitchen shoved off into a corner. Cor left the paper on the counter that served as both table and divider to give the small stove pretensions of having a separate space, and walked over to put some water to boil. Then he retreated to take a shower and get ready for the day. The next mission with the Galahdians was still a week away, and besides his sparring sessions with Nyx on Thursdays, Cor had really nothing to do, to fill up the cavernous silence of his days in Insomnia. Which... was fine, really, that was how it had always been, since Regis had been crowned. Cor liked it, most of the time. 

The upkeep of the cabin was very simple and took up very little of his time: a laundry run on Mondays, to the one place he'd found in the entirety of the damn city that didn't leave his clothes smelling of something sweet and chemical that was painfully offensive on his nose. And every few days, a trip to stock up on groceries and maybe a few new books. There were precious few things Regis needed from him, would let him do for him, and other than that, his time was his own to do with as he wished. 

It was just that it all seemed entirely too quiet, after a few months of running around the countryside with the Galahdians. Cor found he had grown used to having Crowe and Libertus chatting with him or around him, and Pelna sitting nearby, fiddling with something or another while he hummed unknown songs under his breath, and just the feeling of Axis scowling at him, his eyes weighty in ways Cor couldn't explain. And of course Nyx and his questions and his jokes, voice eerily soothing and pleasant to Cor's ears. 

Mostly, he admitted, he missed their smell. They smelled of rain and wet, clean things, of fur and lightning and something unique to them and also each of them. Cor supposed it was petty of him, but he'd never really liked the way humans smelled and he avoided them when he could, because there was always some undercurrent of what he could only name as deceit, acrid and viscous, interwoven into the scent. Everyone was unique, of course, and so were their scents; Clarus smelled of sword oil and expensive ink, Regis smelled of magic gone wrong and wariness. But beneath it, buried deep and then smeared until it was impossible to take it out, there was a certain foulness that drove him mad in a terribly quiet way. 

He still remembered when Clarus and Regis didn't have that in their scent, back when Weskham and Cid were around, and the smells mingled and evened out into something that, were he a more poetic soul, he'd call home. But then they had come back to Insomnia, after the long journey across the world, to the decaying loyalties and the budding hatreds, and found themselves scattered at the whim of the King. Weskham sent to Accordo, to negotiate a peace that no one really thought was necessary, and which to this day made Cor's head hurt to try and understand the politics behind it. Cid to Hammerhead, exiled because he would not bow, would not kneel to a King he didn't think worth serving. And Regis and Clarus, sent far away, to the untamed wilderness of Galahd, to bide their time and prepare for the inevitable. 

Cor had stayed, because he had been the King's best guard, the sharpest sword, the deadliest claws. 

He'd failed anyway, despite it all, and no one but him had mourned the loss of the King, because no one but him had ever known to see the stern kindness in him. No one but him had been around to see the world choke it out of him, snuffing it like a flame, only slowly and painfully, until all that was left of him was a shadow painted in hues of bitterness and disdain. The transformation had been gradual, until one day Cor woke up with the stench of foulness stuck to the roof of his mouth, and found the source of it sitting on the throne. 

Cor knew the King had done unspeakable things, those last few months. Had made Cor do them, in his name. Cor knew it wasn't entirely selfish or senseless, what had been done to the King. But he'd mourned him, anyway, because he mourned the man he had been, before he'd been turned into the tyrant he was remembered as. 

Mors had seen him for what he was, when he'd been frothing mad and barely old enough to be self-aware, when all he had to his name was a sword and the will to use it for exactly what it'd been made. Cor remembered his first meeting with the King, after a failed ambush in the wet, vicious swamps in Duscae, how he'd remarked on Cor striking to kill rather than subdue. Cor had been twelve and half-starved, rejected from the front lines and relegated to running errands for the hunters scattered in between the battlefields, for the sake of a handful of coins. Cor had explained to the King that a sword was only good for one thing, and trying to use it for something else was stupid. Mors had laughed, sharp and bitter but also warm. He'd dropped a hand on Cor's head and ruffled his hair, and made him feel... right. Acknowledged. 

Then he'd become Mors' Sword, just like Clarus' father had been his Shield. 

And it had been fine. It had been right. The screams hadn't haunted him. The blood hadn't bothered him. All he had done, he had done it because it was necessary. Because he could, when everyone else couldn't. All that had been asked of him made sense, back then, because Mors would drop his hand on his head and smile wryly at him, promising to never use him for anything other than what he was intended for. 

And later still, he had become the King's Hound, and he had been given a new purpose and use, but he had met Regis by then, and the title hadn't sat as comfortably in his gut as he felt it should have, because Regis – and Clarus and Cid and Weshkam – looked at him and saw him as... as something he wasn't. Probably had never been. He hadn't been a boy, and he wasn't a man, and their attempts to treat him like one had only muddled the clear waters in his head, left everything tilted and off-axis. 

In the darkest corners of his mind, Cor wondered if it hadn't been for Regis' own soft kindness, that he had ended up failing Mors when he had needed him the most. But the thought was futile and worthless, because he couldn't change what had already happened. He couldn't be again what he'd been, before. Regis had changed him, with his friendship and his insistence that Cor deserved more than to be the nightmare the King used to enforce his rule, even if Cor had been willing to embrace his nature. 

Cor knew he was not Regis' Hound or Sword or any of the things he could – should – be. Because Regis thought he was better than that, that he deserved something cleaner, less vicious. Cor had given up trying to make him understand how wrong he was about that, just as he'd given up trying to pretend to be human, for Clarus' sake. 

Cor turned the water off and dried himself slowly, pensive. He was supposed to meet Nyx in the afternoon, for another round of sparring. He... liked the sparring, actually. A lot more than he originally thought he would. He'd grown rusty without meaning to, and he was forced to admit he wasn't as good with a sword as he'd once been, before. But then, it had been a long time, since he stopped regularly training like he used to, if nothing else because he'd only ever trained with Clarus before and... well, he'd given up on a lot of things, to avoid Clarus' disappointment. He was strong, though, inhumanly so at that, so it didn't really matter if he didn't have technique, despite Clarus' protests about it. And he never really fought with a sword anymore, anyway, not since the Cave and the Blademaster. 

Nyx was good, though. Entirely different from anything Cor had ever fought before, but... good. Fun, almost. Which was somewhat bizarre for him to realize, because fighting and training had never felt like that, before. After all, fighting was a prelude for killing anyway, and Cor had never really grown a taste for it. Not for fun, for all it was his duty, his talent, the one thing he was good at and made him worthwhile. But he'd found Nyx was as playful when they sparred as he was when he was shifted, and he made Cor think on his feet, trying to avoid getting stabbed for his trouble. It was... _fun_. 

Then again, Cor thought somewhat somberly as he draped the towel around his shoulders and went to serve the boiling water into a mug, that had been before the awkward incident the week before. 

He should probably apologize for that. 

He opened the cabinet above the sink and sniffed, squinting at the collection of tins neatly stacked inside. A second sniff, and he reached out for a square, blue one. He twisted the cap open and took a deep breath, feeling his shoulders relax a little. He pulled open the drawer under the counter, and pulled out an infuser without really looking. He collected them, as something of a curiosity mixed with a utility. People were staggeringly creative when it came to making mundane things into something more, and he could afford the expense. It was... whimsical of him, perhaps. But he did drink a lot of tea – he only drank tea, most of the time, if he had to be honest about it – so it wasn't like he was hoarding something he never planned to use. That morning, the infuser in question was a small, metal basket with a screw-on top that mimicked a shark's fin. Cor smiled wryly at it as he dropped a teaspoon of leaves into it and then left it floating in his mug. 

He supposed he'd procrastinated enough about it, apologizing to Nyx for his rather hasty exit. Should have gone back and rectified the situation immediately when it happened, but Cor was borderline allergic to awkward social situations and every social situation that included him was awkward by default. It was normal, that kind of thing. Some people got too much into a fight and their bodies just. Responded. That was all. He'd made it weird, because he always made everything weird, which was why he avoided people as a whole, most of the time. And it would be fine, really, except for the bit he actually enjoyed the sparring, and the fact he still had to work with the man in a somewhat professional setting. Although calling his missions with the Galahdians professional was... a stretch. They were mostly glorified road trips and would drive someone like Drautos, who was every bit the career soldier Cor wasn't, up a wall if he knew about it. Even calling them missions felt weird, in the context of what Cor knew about the Lucian military – though granted, he'd been out of the loop of it for about fifteen years thanks to Regis' insistence to not use him the same way his father had, but things could only change so much. The military was all about rank and order and a million other nuances that... Cor had observed from up close, while serving Mors, but hadn't really participated in due to his unique place as the King's Sword, and later, as his Hound. 

There was none of that, in his work with the Galahdians, which was honestly more like glorified babysitting and incidentally, probably the only reason Regis had allowed him to take on it. He wasn't even supposed to fight, and he hadn't, so far, keeping himself to the periphery and allowing the Galahdians to do their thing. Cor picked the targets, sifting through the intel Clarus dropped along with the paper every morning, and he accompanied the Galahdians to make sure things didn't spin out of control, but that was it. It was... menial, at best, but it was still something Regis had asked of him, and Cor was so desperate to be of use, that he hadn't expected to find himself enjoying it. 

But he did. 

And now this. 

He was not very good at apologizing. He was not very good at any number of social graces, to be honest. Most of them involved lying in some fashion, and he was an honest creature by nature. Mors had found it amusing, and encouraged the habit in him. Clarus tried to explain why he should at least lie a little, sometimes, but as with most of the things Clarus told him he should do, Cor ignored it. He didn't have a place in the court or in Insomnia, not among humans anyway. And he wasn't human. He didn't have to play by their rules. It didn't matter, if they disliked him for it. 

The tea smelled ready, so he plucked the infuser out of the mug and left it on the counter, pulling the mug up to take a good sniff. He was thinking in circles again. He took a sip of tea, savoring it, and then sighed. 

He wasn't even sure if Nyx would still show up for their session or not, but he supposed the least he could do was go. If Nyx was there, he'd apologize and maybe they could move on from the whole thing. Or better yet, pretend it never happened. If not... well, they still had a mission the next week. 

Cor sighed, rubbing a hand through his hair somewhat fretfully. Everything was so needlessly complicated sometimes... but he supposed the only thing he could do was take it in stride. He was good at that, if nothing else. 

He should probably get dressed, too. 

* * *

“I'm sorry!” 

Cor blinked, the script he'd spend all day painstakingly crafting crashing loudly somewhere in the back of his head. 

Nyx looked to be bracing for... something. Cor just stood there and stared at him in fascination, head slightly tilted to the side. After a moment, Nyx let out a breath, almost like a sigh, and let his shoulders slump. 

“I'm so sorry,” he said again, though for the life of him Cor couldn't figure out what he was apologizing for, “I just... you know.” Nyx shrugged. “Yeah. It's okay if you're mad.” 

Cor blinked again. 

“I'm not,” he said, because he wasn't. He frowned slightly, when he realized that Nyx was staring somewhat expectantly at him. “I... forgive you?” He tried, somewhat stupidly, mostly because he was not aware of anything Nyx had done that would merit an apology of any kind. 

But it seemed to be the right thing to say, if anything because Nyx relaxed visibly, and the tang of anxiety tickling Cor's nose dissipated almost instantly. 

“You sure?” He asked, still looking fairly apologetic. “I mean, I get it, you know? You're not... yeah. So. It wasn't like I was trying to ignore that. It just...” 

“It happens,” Cor said, mystified and not entirely sure what the hell Nyx was going on about, but trying to wrestle the conversation back into something resembling sense. “It's fine.” 

Nyx's shoulders slumped. 

“Cool,” he said, hands stuck into the back pockets of his pants, forcing his spine to tilt forward slightly and make him seem smaller than he really was. “We're cool then.” 

“...yes?” Cor replied, somewhat aware of the fact that his apology was... not required after all. “If you are,” he added, shrugging. 

In his experience, it was best to let others take the lead, when it came to conversations. It wasn't like he knew what the hell he was doing anyway. Nyx grinned. 

“I am,” he said, nodding easily. “Super cool. Absolute chill, it is me.” 

Cor had only a vague understanding of what that meant, but he was willing to take it. 

“...sparring?” He said, tilting his head towards the open space behind him. 

“Sure,” Nyx laughed, brightening up, and maybe he too enjoyed their little bouts, though probably not for the same reason Cor did. 

Cor still wasn't sure on what had just happened, or why, but it seemed to be the ideal outcome and he wasn't about to complain about that. Humans were weird, period. 

* * *

The rest of the week was fairly normal, after that. 

Cor was glad for it, mostly. He still wasn't entirely sure how things had resolved themselves the way they had, but he decided not to linger on it. What was done, was done. Before he even noticed, he was back on the road, with five sleepy Galahdians in the van, heading out to Cleigne this time around. 

Everything was fine. 

Fine. 

He wondered how many times he had to say it, until he finally believed it. 

* * *

Pelna was taking pictures. 

Cor gave him a terribly annoyed look that only made him laugh and snap another shot, his phone flashing brightly as it captured yet another still of Cor with Crowe balancing bravely on his head, Nyx and Libertus trying to find their footing to climb up his back, and Axis hissing up a storm, somewhere under his paws. 

Cor liked Pelna, most of the time. He was quiet and peaceful and his laughter had a nice ring to it, entirely lacking the playful mocking undertone in everyone else's. He gave him the least trouble in the field, too. Pelna was always the first one to shift back and he never really tried to chew through Cor's fur, before he did. Mostly he did his thing and gave him knowing smiles here and there, for things Cor couldn't even being to fathom. But someone – Cor was going to find out who and glower threateningly in their general direction, as soon as they got back to Insomnia – had given the Galahdian cellphones. 

Cor had a cellphone too, admittedly, but his was simple and utilitarian and also woefully unused, for all he always remembered to carry it with him when he left home, in the remote possibility Regis or Clarus would need to get a hold of him. Pelna's had a camera – Cor would, at a much later date, find out that so did his, because that was the sort of thing all cellphones had – and Pelna found a singular delight in using it. 

“I'm sorry,” Pelna said, snickering as he shrugged. “They won't believe me otherwise.” 

Cor huffed in reply and then dropped his head forward, smothering Axis just as he managed to squirm from under his paws. Cor grunted as he got shocked on the underside of his jaw for his trouble, but the attacks – which would be strong enough to kill a man, ordinarily – did little more than sting somewhat. Crowe let out a sound best described as a disgruntled chirp as she sank her claws into his head and tried to keep her place atop her perch. 

Pelna's phone flashed again, just as Cor felt Libertus curl up into a ball right atop his shoulders, while Nyx walked down the length of his spine, intent on investigating his tail. 

“You're extremely patient, Marshal,” Pelna said, wry smile pulling at his lips as his amusement overpowered every other note in his scent. Cor was annoyed by how pleasant it was, overall. “It's very appreciated.” 

Cor flashed his teeth at him, still not particularly amused. 

“Very, very appreciated,” Pelna insisted, laughing again. 

It had been a good mission, admittedly. The drive hadn't been boring – none of the drives had been, except the first one, mostly because Nyx took it upon himself to ask questions and didn't seem to mind if Cor's answers were short, which in turn usually sparked a conversation with the rest, and even if he was terrible at conversations, Cor didn't mind listening to them, sometimes – and the weather had been nice. There had been no close calls with hunters. The target hadn't been heavily fortified. No one who shouldn't had been hurt. It was all just a matter of waiting for the others to exhaust their seemingly bottomless supply of rage, and shift back, and they could head back to camp and relax. 

“Ugh,” Libertus said, some twenty minutes later, and rather than slide off Cor's back, buried his face further into his fur. 

Cor considered reaching out to grab him with his teeth, but that'd require him to let Axis go, and if there was one thing Cor knew, it was that he shouldn't ever let Axis go. So he sighed, and let Pelna take more pictures. 

“Well hello, there,” Crowe said, a little later, as she shifted back until she was mounted on his snout, and leaned in until Cor's eyes crossed slightly. “Fancy meeting you here, Mr. Fursplosion.” 

Cor whined at her, more out of habit than any real hope to get her to stop using that term, and grunted as she heaved herself back to her feet, but rather than jumping off, she started climbing back onto his head. It didn't hurt, obviously, nothing about them ever hurt, that was the whole point. But it wasn't terribly dignified. Then again, what did he care about being dignified? 

Nyx was back before he could untangle that metaphorical cul-de-sac. He climbed on Cor's back and helped Crowe try to peel Libertus off, though to not much success. Pelna was taking even more pictures, grinning to himself. 

When at long last Axis stopped hissing and spitting, Cor raised his head cautiously, peering down at the man lying between his paws and looking not particularly amused. 

“Axis,” Pelna said, in a quiet, but stern tone, just as Axis was opening his mouth to say something probably rude and full of profanity. “Don't.” 

Axis' nostrils flared as he scoffed, and then sat up, scowling. 

Cor didn't know what possessed him to do it, honestly, only that Axis reminded him so keenly of Clarus at that moment, the put out expression and the frankly childish sulking, that before he knew what he was doing, he'd licked the surly Galahdian across the face. Well, across the torso and face and basically everything he could reach, considering the size of his tongue. 

There was a moment of silence as Axis processed the fact. Then he snarled at Cor, just as Pelna spluttered and leaped off from the ground, crossing the distance in three long strides, and caught the shorter man as he prepared to throw himself at Cor with a growl. 

“Axis!” Pelna grunted, trying not to laugh as he wrapped his arms around his waist and hauled him back forcefully. 

“I'm going to _kill_ you,” Axis hissed, squirming in Pelna's hold and making to kick Cor. 

Cor snorted. 

“Hey, what's the racket about?” Crowe asked, just as Nyx managed to dislodge Libertus and both came tumbling down Cor's side. 

Pelna saw it coming. Cor knew, because he saw his expression change minutely as he tightened his grip on Axis, just seconds before Cor licked him – them – again. 

Axis shrieked in the back of his throat and flailed some more. 

“You're my _hero_ ,” Crowe snorted, trying to bury desperate giggles behind her hands. “Holy shit.” 

* * *

Axis spent the entirety of dinner sitting on Pelna's lap, glowering at Cor. 

Cor laid on his side and amused himself watching Crowe, Nyx and Libertus – all three sprawled on his side for warmth – fling teasing remarks in Axis' general direction, before Pelna tightened his grip on his arm and told him to behave himself. He had honestly not expected that reaction to the teasing, and he still wasn't sure why he'd given to the impulse, but he couldn't deny the look on Axis' face had been beautifully hilarious. 

It still reminded him of Clarus – younger, less stern, less driven by the weight of the entire kingdom on his shoulders – taking everything so seriously Cor couldn't help but try and make light of things. Pelna didn't seem mad about it, for all he was busy keeping Axis in place. On the contrary, he kept giving Cor amused looks, lips curved into a mischievous smile. Crowe made another joke, and snuggled further into Cor's side, sitting between Nyx and Libertus and looking entirely too amused by Axis' sulking. 

It had been a terribly impulsive thing to do, but not necessarily a mistake. Cor remembered his own thoughts about needing to be professional about the whole endeavor, even when it resisted it by nature, and snorted at himself. He shrugged when he realized he'd gotten everyone's attention with the sound, and pretended to yawn widely before dropping his head on his paws. 

He wondered absently, as he settled in for a nap while everyone else wrapped up dinner, what was going to happen, once the war was over and these outings became unnecessary. He was almost annoyed to realize he was going to miss them – the drives and the walks and the fights and the terrible jokes – once they were gone. 

It was almost a novel concept. 

* * *

Cor dreamed memories again, terrible and truthful and disjointed. He woke up with a start and the haunting sound of human bones being crushed between his teeth. 

“Easy,” Nyx said, placing a hand fearlessly on the top of his snout, staring impassively as Cor's eyes frantically scanned his surroundings. “Just a dream, Marshal.” 

Cor relaxed in stages, ears flattered against the back of his skull as he resisted the urge to snarl. Nyx wouldn't know it for what it was, after all. It took actual effort, to force his breathing to be even, but Cor tried and tried, until his fur was no longer bristling and he could smell the actual forest around them, as opposed to the ghost of things better left forgotten. 

“Do you want to talk about it?” Nyx asked quietly, nonchalant in a way that Cor felt miserably envious of, one hand still pressed against the sensitive skin around Cor's nose. “The dream, I mean.” 

Cor stared at him. Nyx stared right back, friendly and open and entirely alien in the weird hours before dawn. Cor shook his head slowly, careful not to let it drag down his shoulders and become a shrug, lest he dislodged the others and woke them up. Nyx frowned, but nodded after a moment despite the spike of something like concern in his scent. 

“Alright,” but he didn't go to lie on Cor's side, soaking up warmth with the others, and instead went to poke at the fire and sat by it again. 

Cor fell asleep trying to figure out what that meant. 

* * *

“You're an asshole,” Axis told him, watching dispassionately as Cor shuffled his clothes back on. “A veritable fucking shithead,” he added, eyebrows arched and expression pinched. “You should come drink with us anyway.” 

Cor paused in the process of sliding a t-shirt down his chest, and blinked. Axis arched both eyebrows at him, almost challengingly. He smelled... he smelled of rain and thunder and the sour aftertaste of what Cor could only describe as _indigo_. But there was no deceit to him, nothing foul or vile to make Cor's stomach roll uncomfortably in his gut whenever he caught whiff of it. Axis was vicious and monstrous and not too terribly nice, as a whole, but he was honest and upfront about it, and that almost made up for it, as far as Cor was concerned. 

“I don't... I don't drink,” Cor replied, because it was the truth, and blinked again when Axis narrowed his eyes at him, looking up with a squint. 

“Too good for it?” Axis demanded, and Cor realized he was angry, the smell sharp and overwhelming and _new_ , because for all Axis was very good at being disagreeable almost to the point of making an art of it, Cor realized he'd managed to offend him somehow. 

“No,” he replied, pulling the shirt down and running his hands along his sides, just feeling the texture to distract himself slightly. “I just don't drink.” He paused, and added, almost as a token of good will: “Never have, really.” 

Axis' anger twisted into something else, something less sharp. 

“What do you mean _never have_?” He demanded, stepping closer as he frowned. 

Cor did not step back, merely stared down at the shorter man with a shrug. 

“Exactly that,” he said, and sat on the edge of the open trunk to slide on his socks. “I like tea.” 

“Fuck that,” Axis snorted, shaking his head. “You're coming with us.” 

Cor felt that, if he had it at the moment, all his fur would be standing on end. Instead he slid on his shoes and stood up again, only then noticing the others were hanging by the sidelines, watching them carefully. 

“Why?” 

Axis smirked. 

“Because you're an _asshole_ ,” he said, and reached out to shove Cor back, hard enough to make him stumble, just a little, and laughed, low and sharp, “so you might as well.” 

Cor licked his lips and tasted expectation in the air, even as he forced himself not to look and find out what the others looked like, at the moment. 

“Fine.” 

Because it was. It _was_. He was. 

What could possibly go wrong? 

* * *


	3. the galahdian way

* * *

_iii. the galahdian way_

* * *

“I'm not drinking that,” Cor said, wrinkling his nose in a way that made Nyx imagine him baring his teeth as a wolf, it had the same displeased and disgruntled look to it, somehow. 

“Aw, c'mon,” Crowe jeered at him, because of course Crowe was on board with the idea of getting Cor shitfaced with them, Nyx had the feeling Crowe was on board with any idea so long as it was fundamentally terrible. “Don't be like that, Puppy, it's not even that strong!” 

The entire left side of Cor's face twitched at the nickname, just like it had, the last seven times Crowe had used it, since she came up with it. 

“It smells revolting,” Cor informed her, slowly inching back and away, and awkwardly closer and closer to Nyx's side. 

Nyx wondered if he should say something about that, or just wait for the inevitable awkwardness when Cor ended up touching him. 

Crowe stopped and stared at him. 

“That's your great gripe with it?” She asked, eyebrows arched. “Pinch your nose and knock it back in one go. That's how shots are supposed to be had.” 

“No,” Cor replied, weirdly prim and quiet, and Nyx bit the inside of his lip to keep from laughing out right. 

“Okay, okay,” Axis said, because he was invested now, and Nyx had learned to dread Axis getting a thought stuck in his head, because it never _left_. “Fine, if we get you something that doesn't smell like that, will you drink it?” 

Cor stared at him with a vaguely taken aback expression. 

“Do I _have_ to?” 

Nyx actually barked a laugh when the resounding answer was: 

“ _Yes_.” 

Which of course meant a very ill advised supply run to a liquor store, starting by the fact none of them had any actual money, so Cor had to pay for all of it. He was a terribly good sport about it, too, looking mostly bemused by the proceedings. Nyx wondered absently what they looked like, crowd of cackling, taunting idiots loitering about, carrying enough booze to down a feral behemoth and also a blender and glasses and half the fruit inventory of the one grocery shop they found open so late at night. 

He couldn't help but notice the way Cor would startle, whenever someone touched him, a brush here and there, because they were halfway drunk already, purely on the expectation of what they had set out to accomplish. He didn't look upset, no, mostly... surprised. 

“You're going to regret this,” Nyx pointed out, lips pulled into a half smile, carrying his share of the loot close to his chest, as they slowly made their way back to the Citadel. 

Cor gave him a long look and then snorted. 

“You say that,” he said, deadpan and dry, “like I don't already do.” 

But he dutifully followed them back up the endless maze of corridors and lifts into the quarters they'd been given, and he still looked, beneath it all, solidly amused by the whole ordeal. 

Nyx wondered if, before the night was out, he was going to finally hear the son of a bitch laugh, because he was masochistic like that. 

* * *

Cor rejected most of the stuff they came up with after one or two dubious sips, but it was booze so of course someone had to drink it so it didn't go to waste. Nyx drank his share of rejects, and found himself sprawled on the couch watching the action while the edges blurred slightly and he felt pleasantly buzzed. He still somehow managed to be the most sober person in the room, by the time dawn started to loom in the horizon and people shuffled back to their own rooms. 

“C'mon,” Nyx said, grinning as Cor whined low in the back of his throat, a very wolf-like sound coming out of a very human throat, and tugged the man up and away from the couch he was halfway sprawled on. “Up you go, Marshal.” 

“I should go,” Cor muttered, utterly boneless in his grasp, and then tilted his head forward, nose buried into Nyx's shoulder and _sniffed_. 

Nyx blinked. 

“Did you just _smell_ me?” He asked, blinking, as Cor seemed to turn more and more into a shapeless mass purely held together by Nyx's hands on him. Cor made a small, quiet noise and stayed where he was, slumped in his arms. “...okay,” Nyx told no one in particular. 

The thing was, Cor was heavy. A lot heavier than Nyx expected him to be. It was almost like he really was his monstrous wolf form neatly folded over and over again until he fit inside his human bones. Or maybe he was just dense with muscle and too drunk to not be dead weight. Nyx reckoned he shouldn’t have that much trouble holding him, either way, but he did. When he let Cor fall into his bed – alongside the obligatory not now hiss at his own brain – he found himself unceremoniously dragged down with him. And there wasn’t much he could do about it, either, because Cor was solid and strong and trying his drunken best to curl himself around him. So that was a thing. 

It was nice, which was terrible, so of course Nyx did the sensible thing and stared at the ceiling, listening to Cor’s breathing slow against his throat, until he passed out. 

He woke up drowning in fur. 

It took Nyx a moment to orient himself, buried as he was deep in a ball of fur and slow, steady breathing that echoed all around him. 

...alright, it took him more than a moment. More like two and a half, and then the hungover hit him like a truck and he groaned miserably because despite the angry throbbing in his head, that was the least of his problems. 

Then Cor woke up. 

“Hey, hey, hey!” Nyx said, digging his fingers into fur and trying his best to sound soothing, “c’mon, Marshal, calm down. Can you shift back? Just for a bit?” And then, when all he got for his trouble was low growling, “ _Cor_.” 

His shaking… he couldn’t call it a bed, that’d imply he could even see the ceiling, no, he was cradled in fur, sank somewhere against Cor’s side, stuck as it were, between solid muscle deep beneath the carpet of black fur. Nyx wondered why he was arguing semantics with himself when the point was that Cor had stilled at the sound of his name, so much it almost seemed like he’d stopped breathing altogether. And then, the whine. It was low and miserable and loud, and it echoed the headache mercilessly tormenting his own head. 

“Please,” Nyx said, eyes closed as he tilted his head back against him, “shift back. I know it hurts and I can make it better.” 

Well, he thought so anyway. He was good dealing with hangovers. Being Libertus friend kind of made it a necessity, and Nyx had known the surly git for about twenty two of his twenty three years of life. And Cor absolutely had to be dealing with the worst kind of hangover at the moment: the unexpected first one. 

Nyx promised solemnly to feel bad for him and offer sympathies as soon as he was done swimming in fur and feeling like his head was trying its darn hardest to implode between his ears. 

There was another pitiful whine, but before he could decide to try another coaxing plea, the fur around him began to thin. Feeling Cor shift under his hands was quite possibly the weirdest fucking thing Nyx had ever experienced in his life… and that counted for something, considering he’d been eaten alive by a coeurl when he was seventeen. Nyx wobbled a little, tumbling off as Cor’s body shrunk beneath him, and the next thing he knew they were lying on the ground and the room was a mess completely covered in black fur. 

“I’m going to murder you for this,” Cor muttered miserably, face buried under an arm. 

“I think you already murdered my room,” Nyx pointed out with a snort, which made Cor wince like he’d been struck. Yeah, that looked like one hell of a hangover alright. “So we’ll call it even.” 

Cor made a very rude gesture with one hand, but refrained from saying anything or threatening further violence. Nyx thought it was uncalled for. _He_ hadn’t transformed into a giant ball of fur that barely fit inside the room, after all. He watched Cor stand up on slightly woobly feet. 

“What,” Cor hissed at him, when he realized Nyx was staring. 

“Nothing, just,” Nyx replied, shrugging and trying not to laugh, because there was something vaguely hilarious about the miserably cranky look on Cor’s face and he wasn’t sure he wasn’t going to get bitten for his trouble if he let out the snicker that was trying to crawl up his throat. “Y’know. Wondering if you wanted to borrow some pants.” 

Because the whole side effects of fursploding were still a thing, with Cor. And maybe Nyx was finding some solace from his headache by admiring the view, but he wasn’t a _complete_ asshole. Cor stared at him blankly. 

“Y’know,” Nyx insisted, and helpfully pointed vaguely at Cor’s crotch. 

Cor didn’t blush or stutter or look ashamed of his nudity. He never did, and Nyx didn’t really even expect it anymore, but it was fun to point it out because what Cor did, was look annoyed. Like the whole concept of clothing had been specifically designed to piss him off, personally. 

Nyx still thought it was kinda cute. 

...dammit. 

* * *

Cor’s presence during their post-mission drinking sessions became familiar, after that. 

Even though he certainly refused to drink quite as much, and it was always a pain and a half to get the stuff he liked, and he growled a lot and Nyx’s room got obliterated five seperate times more, because he kept shifting in his sleep sometimes, after he passed out. It was a distressingly comfortable routine that they fell into, between trying their best to uproot all imperial presence in Duscae and not think about the fact it was widely known the actual war was going very poorly, for Lucis. They were told to report nothing but lies to the King and Clarus, and that’s what they’d done so far. But even if their missions – it sounded so fancy, calling them missions, like they actually know what the hell they were doing – went well, they couldn’t tell anyone, and they didn’t have anyone to tell them if they really did go well, or if they were just imagining things going better than they were. 

Nyx thought about such things, because it was better and more productive than being an idiot and thinking about something else, like the fact Cor took to sprawling when he was drunk, and he had a habit to try and hide behind him, as if Nyx could somehow save him from Crowe and her sharp eyes and even sharper words. He wasn’t supposed to, though. He wasn’t supposed to care about the war, any more he was supposed to care about Cor. He knew why they were in Insomnia, after all, and he knew it was… well, it wasn’t for the sake of the war or their games tormenting the court or any of the things they did to pass the time. 

They were, after all, soldiers of a sort, just not the sort the King thought them as. 

But Nyx thought of that, instead, because the alternative was pointing out they were encroaching dangerously on Cor, leaving spaces for him among them, and it was comfortable and normal and fine, except not really, because Cor wasn’t Galahdian, Cor wasn’t like _them_. Sure, he was fun to hang out with, dry and deadpan and utterly unamused and unimpressed by everything, which meant everything around him became ten times more entertaining by default. And he wasn’t shitty like most Lucians they’d met, treating them like weird curiosities brought out of a land they imaged forever sunk in ancient, primitive times. 

Cor was fun and familiar and borderline nice, if nice could be feral and deadpan and kind of a dick, sure. The asshole had ended a bickering session two days earlier by dropping a bag of catnip in Nyx’s hands. Douche. 

But he wasn’t one of them. 

He couldn’t be. 

He didn’t have lightning under his skin nor a coeurl prowling inside his bones, waiting for the day he ceased to be himself and the coeurl could go on, forever. Cor didn’t know what the salt of the sea breeze tasted between his teeth, tempered with ozone from a good storm. Cor didn’t have a leash wrapped around his throat, chaining down his existence to a single choice. Cor didn’t know what it sounded like, to hear their maker sing along the chorus of Galahd raging. 

When they asked him, awkward and tentative and trying not to open themselves to questions they couldn’t answer, nothing he’d said made any sense. Nothing about him made any sense, period. His age and his rank and his curse and the bizarrely nuanced tangents he could go on, four shots in, when he was relaxed and his tongue was loose, and the contrast with the vast, cavernous gaps in common, every day knowledge he seemed utterly oblivious about. 

He wasn’t like them, at all, and Nyx kept reminding himself because that meant he wasn’t going back home with them, whenever the King’s ridiculous charade ended. 

Cor wasn’t someone they could get attached to, someone that was safe to bond with, because he didn’t understand those bonds were temporary. 

Nyx thought about those things, worrying his the inside of his bottom lip with his teeth and staring at the bland ceiling of his room, because it was better than admit he had… things that were awkward and intrusive and almost not quite feelings, about Cor and his deadpan and his contradictions, and he didn’t know how to get rid of them, so they festered instead. And every time Nyx laid against the solid, soft fur of Cor’s side, while on route to their next target, every time Axis got scathing and Cor snarled and inched his way behind him at the same time, every time he woke up in bed with a hung over, miserable man – sometimes, miserable wolf – sprawled on his bed… 

Every single time, Nyx told himself to do the smart thing and pull away. 

And every single time, he fell in a little harder, instead. 

He wasn’t even offering, anymore. Cor clearly wasn’t interested, and at this point Nyx wasn’t sure it would be wise of him to offer. He could look, sometimes – and oh, fuck whoever cursed Cor the way he’d been cursed, fuck the absolute jerk Cor couldn’t bring himself to name, because Cor had no concept of shame and Nyx felt like a creep for appreciating that – and he hated himself for it, the fact he looked and wanted and twisted himself into lovely, gnarled knots about it. 

At least, Nyx consoled himself… at least it couldn’t possibly get any worse. 

...Right? 

* * *

“So I’ve been thinking,” Axis said during breakfast, one early autumn morning – Insomnia had seasons and they were about to witness the change into unfamiliar climate, as the lackluster spring and the depressingly short summer came to a close – rolling porridge around a bowl with a spoon. “About the game night.” 

Nyx stared at his plate, since he had nothing to contribute about that. He was welcome to join them – they offered, they knew how it worked – but he knew better than to take them up on it, when the inside of his head was boiling with frustration the way it was. And it was nice, the way things worked, because _no one asked_. No one thought it was weird he chose not to. They offered and he chose and that was all there was to it. Simple. Uncomplicated. 

Now if only the inside of his head could fucking get on with the program, it’d be great. 

“You’ve been scheming,” Pelna corrected, yawning behind a hand, staring at the morning’s offerings on the table with bleary eyes. “And ignoring me when I say it’s a terrible idea.” 

“You think everything he does is a terrible idea, though,” Libertus pointed out, snorting into a cup of coffee, that same terrible smirk hanging off the corner of his lip that Nyx had always known and dreaded, because Libertus could not see a fan spinning and not feel the urge to throw some shit at it. 

“I think we should invite the Mutt to the next one,” Axis said, shrugging casually like he hadn’t just said something borderline blasphemous. 

“I’m in,” Crowe replied, almost instantly, and it didn’t quite cover the sound of Nyx choking on his own coffee. She gave a slow, thorough shrug when they stared at her. “I have eyes.” 

Nyx continued to quietly choke on coffee. Everyone else continued to politely ignore it and instead turned to Pelna. 

“I’m not _against_ it,” he said, with the resigned look of someone who wasn’t also entirely for it. “If he’s into it.” 

Libertus scoffed. 

“I suppose it depends on who asks,” he pointed out, and then turned to Nyx, who had finally freed his windpipe enough he wasn’t feeling like he was dying anymore, just merely wishing he was. “You reckon he’d be into it?” 

Nyx met the inquisitive stares and wished for nothing more than the ability to shift and take off running, and maybe never stop. 

“The hell would _I_ know?” He croaked, voice raw and tone defensive. 

“’cause you two are attached to the hip pretty much always?” Crowe pointed out uncharitably, eyebrows arched like that wasn’t the most ridiculous thing Nyx had ever heard in his life. 

“And he’s sweet on you,” Axis added, lips pulling back into a kind of smirk that was more show of fangs than anything else. 

Nyx stared. 

“And we all know you’re sweet on him,” Libertus added, like the traitorous, fucking shithead he was. 

“I’m going back to bed,” Nyx snarled, once he was done spluttering, and pretended really hard his face wasn’t burning, “and then maybe I’ll wake up in a version of the universe that actually makes fucking _sense_.” 

* * *

The next mission, however, took them to Duscae, to a marshy, swampy, catoblepas-infested shithole that Nyx would be very, very happy to never visit ever again. 

The rain was _oily_. 

They knew damn well the rain in the mainland was nothing like the clean, soothing downpours back home, but none of the lackluster storms they’d experienced in their months pretending they knew what the fuck they were doing, could have prepared them for the kind of shit they had to endure out there. 

In retrospect, that had been their first clue that things were not going to go according to plan, almost like an omen from the Old Man, warning them to turn tail and head back home. 

Instead they’d gone on, away from the highway and civilization, and deeper into the weirdly hostile wilderness where the empire was apparently preparing to set up a new base. They were used to hostile wildlife, of course, but there was a key difference to it, a certain air of… petty malevolence. In Galahd, anything and everything was out to kill you, of course, but it wasn’t personal. It was just the way things were, back home. Out there in the marsh, there was almost like the ghost of something angry and bitter, personally out to get them. Or at least, it felt that way. 

The most damning thing of all was the fact Cor kept close to them, a massive black shadow trailing their steps, as opposed to his usual habit to vanish in between camping spots, sometimes for hours at the time. 

They were almost expecting it, when they got ambushed. 

Mostly. 

The last thing Nyx remembered clearly was a giant armored MT armor landing with a loud crash barely a few feet away from Crowe, who shifted mid swearing. 

Then he was swallowed by the surprise and the rage that came with it, and the coeurl took over. 

* * *

Nyx had a weird sense of déjà vu, as he woke up under a mountain of suffocating fur. 

“I think he’s mad at us,” Pelna told him, when he realized Nyx was back to his senses, because of course Pelna was always the first one to shift back. 

“Cor,” Nyx said, in his best placating voice, “c’mon.” 

Cor made a low, growling sound, and curled up tighter around them. 

“Exactly like that, yeah,” Pelna laughed, like there was nothing wrong or uncomfortable or weird, about being buried under the bulk of Cor’s fur. “At least we’re sleeping warm tonight.” 

Nyx muttered something rude about that, and waited for the others to shift back, convinced maybe then Cor would let them go. 

He didn’t. 

When they woke up again, after falling asleep under a very stubborn asshole of a wolf, he was gone and they could finally take stock of their surroundings. A cold, wet cave of some sort, kind of creepily tucked inside the base of one of the giant stone rings around the remnants of the meteor. Which also meant they were somehow nearly three days away from their target, despite being only two hours away, when they had gotten ambushed. 

They found Cor in a nearby creek, drinking from it and leaving trails of blood into the water, from where his muzzle was stained with it. 

They decided the polite thing would be not to ask about those. 

“Ready for round two, Puppy?” Crowe asked him, hands on her hips, as they broke up camp. 

Cor looked down at them like he was given due serious thought to eating them in one bite, and then seemed to think better of it, because he started walking slowly into the trees. 

Nyx supposed they’d find out what they did to piss him off, once the mission was over and he turned back. 

Probably. 

* * *

“That’s karma,” Nyx told Cor, once they were back in the safety of the citadel, sprawled comfortably in the obscenely large couch of the common area, toasting to another mission success, and Cor explained the effect of the fungus spores on their coeurl counterparts, “for the goddamn catnip jokes.” 

Cor scowled down at the bright plastic cup in his hand, full of bright plastic looking booze, that smelled of cherries and something sickeningly sweet, but which, in Nyx’s experience, hit like a kick to the teeth. 

“You deserved every single one of those jokes,” Cor muttered, brow furrowed into a scowl, before he took a sip of his drink and leaned back against the couch. “Asshole.” 

“Hey, Puppy,” Crowe said, before Nyx could come up with a suitable rebuke to deny the truth, “wanna play a game?” 

Nyx choked on his beer very, very quietly. It still made Cor stare at him curiously for a moment, before he turned his attention back to Crowe. 

“A game.” 

“Liar’s dice,” Crowe explained, “winner takes all.” There was a pause as she wiggled her eyebrows at Cor, and Nyx felt weirdly vindicated when Cor merely stared back at her with that little twitch to his eyebrows that meant he had no fucking idea what she was talking about. “And we do mean _all_.” 

“Never played,” Cor deadpanned, shrugging. 

“That’s okay,” Pelna replied, shuffling to sit around the table as Crowe passed around cups and dice. “We play Galahdian rules, too.” 

“Why don’t you stick around and watch tonight’s game?” Axis offered, which was decidedly creepy, in how inviting that was, and Nyx knew Cor noticed because the back of his neck twitched, and he could imagine the wolf’s fur standing on end in surprise and wariness. “Figure out if you’re into it, for next week.” 

Cor nodded, despite the fact he wasn’t one of them, couldn’t be, and then he went back to patting Nyx’s back until he was done choking on his tongue. 

* * *

“Watch it and cry, Lib,” Crowe laughed, about two hours later, unveiling the dice under her cup and making Libertus smack his own cup off the table in annoyance. 

Nyx had spent the entirety of the game quietly explaining what was happening, to Cor, who was sitting on the floor in front of the table, like the actual players where, and who recoiled and pressed back against the couch, as if to hide behind Nyx, when Libertus followed up his tantrum by unceremoniously grabbing a handful of Crowe’s shirt and pulling her – still laughing – over the table and close enough he could kiss her. 

It wasn’t a very chaste kiss. 

“Oh,” Cor said, voice slightly breathy. 

Nyx licked his lips and leaned back against the couch, because neither of them had played so neither of them could touch, but no one said anything about watching. 

“Wishing you’d played blind anyway?” Nyx teased, because it was all meant to be in good fun, and it wasn’t Cor’s fault that the inside of his brain was made of _shit_. 

Cor made a noncommittal noise in the back of his throat, but at least he didn’t run away. 

They got drunk instead, and that made it almost bearable, in Nyx’s opinion, right until he woke up with Cor in his bed and the entirety of his dumb, dumb brain reminded him it really fucking wasn’t. 

* * *

“Axis says you don’t play dice,” Cor told Nyx, the following Thursday, as they wrapped up their sparring session by sitting against the wall and looking after their respective weapons. Cor frowned. “Told me not to tell you.” 

Nyx snorted. 

“Which is why you just told me?” He asked, running a whetstone against the sinuous curve of one of his kukris. 

Cor shrugged eloquently. 

“I make it a point not to do anything Axis tells me to do,” he explained, and gave Nyx a tiny little smile when Nyx laughed about it. 

“It’s Axis,” Nyx replied, staring at the engraving at the hilt of the blade, “so that’s probably wise of you to do.” 

They sat in silence for a while. They usually spent about two hours fooling around in what pretended really hard to be actual sparring and not… well fooling around. Cor was strong to a ridiculous degree, but Nyx was nimble and most of the game was to find ways around that with as many dirty tricks they could muster. Cor had a surprising amount of dirty tricks in his sleeves, as Nyx had found out, despite the outward look of near solemn dignity that he took, whenever there was a sword in his hand. He wasn’t that good, with a sword, but he was getting better, with the sparring. Nyx could tell because it got harder, each time, to get the upper hand. 

“Why,” Cor asked, in that quiet, thoughtful tone of his, “don’t you play dice?” 

Nyx smiled, wry and tired, and passed on the whetstone to Cor. 

“Because that’s not what I want,” Nyx replied, because it was the truth, and then reminded himself this was Cor, who wasn’t Galahdian and didn’t know what a sin it was for Nyx to actually _want_ the way he meant it. “What do _you_ want?” 

And Cor did that thing, then, with his face, the one that made Nyx refuse to believe he was older than he looked – decade and change, even, older than _him_ , somehow – where he frowned at his hands and his feet, like he wasn’t quite sure who they belonged to. And right on cue Nyx felt the urge to tug him close and make a joke, and also right on cue he didn’t. He couldn’t. 

“I don’t know.” 

Nyx licked his lips. 

“Then maybe you should play,” he said, and couldn’t quite decipher the twitch in Cor’s lips when he said that. Nyx shrugged. “You might figure what you want, or at the very least what you don’t.” 

“I’m shit at math,” Cor replied, with a sigh that felt bone-deep, leaning forward slightly. 

Nyx smacked his arm playfully, lips twitching into a smirk. 

“It’s okay, they want to play with you,” he said, and this time Cor understood what the eyebrow wiggle meant, because he bared his teeth. “They’re probably gonna let you win the first one. You’re fucked if you like it, though,” Nyx laughed and Cor smacked him back for the pun – gentle, so gentle, a playful swipe of an arm, when compared to the brutal strength behind each swing of his sword. “ _Then_ you’re gonna have to get good at math.” 

* * *

Saturday Cor and the others sat around the table, with a cup and five dice, and when Cor won, Libertus muttered about beginner’s luck, just as Axis dragged him sideways into him. 

Nyx sat on the couch, drinking beer, and didn’t touch. 

He just _wanted_. 

“You need a shower,” Nyx told Cor, when the others had left, and it was just them sprawled in a couch, staring at nothing in particular. 

Cor snorted. 

“I need to get better at math,” he muttered, and Nyx laughed because it was a good joke, and it wasn’t Cor’s fault that Nyx just wasn’t built to take it. He did not meet Nyx’s eyes. “I should go.” 

“It’s three in the morning and you _really_ need a shower,” Nyx replied, “it’s not the first time you sleep in my bed, anyway.” 

Cor stared up at him, pale blue eyes shrewd, like he was looking for something but didn’t quite remember the shape of it, with Axis’ teeth etched on his throat and the ghost of far too many fingers blooming into bruises on his skin. Nyx stared right back, watching the vestiges with the same concentration he’d watch each touch that left them, and he wanted nothing more at that moment that pull him in and review everything they wanted. 

“Okay,” Cor said and licked his lips. “Maybe next week, you’ll play.” 

Nyx swallowed hard. 

“Maybe.” 

Even though he knew he wouldn’t. 

Couldn’t. 

_Shit_. 


	4. the treacherous general

* * *

_the treacherous general_

* * *

Titus wished for the umpteenth time that he did not find Regis’ wit amusing. 

It was rather unfair, really. Regis was, objectively, a million times more personable than his father. He had all the Lucis Caelum stubbornness, but he managed to reign it in and be an amenable, pleasant man who understood the value of compromise. Mors Lucis Caelum had laughed at the idea of compromise, he did what he thought best and anyone who disagreed could come and fight him for the right to wear the stupid crown on his head. 

Which was exactly how that ended up going, after all. 

Titus had been twenty-two, when the Crystal was blown to smithereens and the Empire had somehow decided _not_ to conquer Lucis, now that their mystical crystal of magical protection was gone. Titus remembered thinking _he_ would have, if he’d been Emperor. Conquer the whole continent and just be at peace at last. Well there had been peace, somehow, but Mors was not very well-loved after that. Hard to be loved when you stole the dreams of a holy chosen king from people who had been worshiping that legend more than the actual gods themselves, for the past two thousand years and change. And there was also the fact the gods themselves seemed to vanish, along with the Crystal, their already empty temples crumbling away to nothing, everywhere but Altissa and Galahd, where rumor said the worship was strong enough to anchor Leviathan and Ramuh into the world. To Titus’ reckoning that meant it was the people’s own fault the gods were gone, if the worship had been so lax and insincere they couldn’t support them like the folk in Altissa and Galahd did. But then it was easier to blame Mors for it too, call him God Slayer and forget about the bit where he also did purge the world clean of daemons. 

Mors had been just… easy to hate. 

He’d been short and thin to the point of looking skeletal, with sunken eyes that were always scheming something. He looked and acted like he had better things to think about than dealing with the people he was dealing with at any given time, and he was not exactly prone to share his thoughts with anyone except maybe his Shield – another man easy to hate, Lucius, given his docile nature and his willingness to follow his King, regardless of where he was heading, which earned him the whispered titled of the _meek_ and louder hisses wondering if Mors had had a competent Shield, if all that ruin would have been allowed to follow. 

And there was the Hound, the nightmare of magic and power curled in the shape of a dog, which Mors used to keep the peace when he lacked the will of the gods and the crystal to justify his authority. A lot of people, these days, thought the Hound was a metaphor for a special task force in service of the late King, men or women given the last ghosts of magic at his disposal to carry out his will. 

Titus had seen the Hound, massive, monstrous beast it was and he knew for a fact it was not a metaphor of any kind, only fuel to the rumors that Mors hadn’t so much destroyed all daemons but tamed them all and fused them into the singular monster that served him so loyally. It had been a relatively popular rumor, that, right up until Mors caught wind about it and decided it was treacherous, so he sent out his Hound to get rid of anyone who repeated it. Titus had been part of the task force created by the Shield to clean up after the Hound and he was always struck by the weirdly precise manner the Hound handled his tasks, for all he’d never been there to see it in action. There was never collateral damage in the way Titus would expect to be a given, considering this was a monstrous dog fueled by magic and the King’s spite. No children harmed, no innocents dragged into it, only the guilty – guilty at least of invoking the King’s wrath – torn to shreds or blasted away to nothing with surprising care, for a beast. In those nights he couldn’t quite sleep, Titus had stared at his ceiling and wondered if beneath the thick black fur, there was a human soul conducting the purge of the King’s enemies. 

All together, Mors had been a far cry to the man Lucis and the whole world had been waiting for, to call chosen king and hero of the realm. But he was the best they had and for a few years, that was enough. 

Then it hadn’t been, and Insomnia had burned. 

Titus remembered the night the King died and Insomnia declared the Lucis Caelum line cursed and unfit to rule. He remembered trying to keep the peace while the vultures tore each other to pieces trying to establish themselves in power, some of them going as far as to claiming to crown themselves Kings or Queens or even Emperor. There had been even a faction who wanted to submit to Niflheim rule. They hadn’t lived for long. 

Titus had been twenty-four when the Hound ran the streets of Insomnia one last time, vanishing from the city with the bloodied remnants of the King that died an inglorious, anonymous death somewhere on the wastes of Leide. He’d found himself in a strange place, then, given authority and power in the budding government that formed after the King died, if nothing else because he was one of the oldest in the Crownsguard, still in service after the riots passed and the generations that served Mors more openly were massacred on the streets. He would have liked to leave, then, but he had nowhere to go and no promises they wouldn’t hunt him down, to make sure he didn’t change his mind and eventually came back. 

Titus had been twenty-six, when Regis came, the Empire backing him, and pacified Lucis under his crown once more. He wasn’t Mors, not by a long shot, but it was still an impressive feat to have accomplished, after two years of independence and anarchy, to have the entirety of his Kingdom fold back under his rule once more. And though more than a few were bitter about having the Empire involved at all, Titus was more impressed by the fact Lucis remained independent once more, rather than just an autonomous colony of the Empire. Again, he had thought, if _he’d_ been in charge of the Empire, that’s exactly what he’d have done. 

Instead, they got Regis. Crowned under no holier power than his own silver tongue to court even the most staunch haters of his father’s legacy to his side. Titus hadn’t been so much courted as offered a drink and a smile and a terribly lewd pun that had taken him two days to figure out, and then he’d stormed into the new King’s office and told him in no uncertain terms that he was going to betray him at the first chance he got, if Regis kept treating him like some sort of Lord. Then Regis had laughed and asked if he could postpone that betrayal by treating Titus like a soldier, and Titus had said yes. 

That had been fifteen years ago. Titus was forty-one years old now, and keenly regretting not having taken the time to figure out how to betray Regis sooner, now that the Empire finally caught up with his logic and declared war on them. Mostly because it now fell on Titus to lead the efforts against the Empire – and its new Emperor, who clearly did not share his father’s love for Regis and his bloodline sitting on their throne – and despite Regis willingness to give him everything Titus asked for, they were losing. Badly. 

They just couldn’t keep up with the Empire’s machine soldiers, not with just swords and guns and some antiquated explosive recipes about two hundred years old. Lucis had always fought with magic, and their magic came from the King, who took it from the Crystal. Mors had lost his magic, entirely, after the Crystal was shattered and what little Regis had left, it wasn’t strong enough to really leave a dent in the Empire’s ranks. 

And then, there was Cor. 

Titus did not like Cor very much. Because Cor was an entitled brat that Regis dug out of nowhere, to bestow rank he didn’t deserve and didn’t do anything with, back when he’d been first crowned. Cor technically outranked Titus – and he wasn’t mad about it, he was a bigger man than that – and the whole of the Crownsguard, but Cor was never around. He had means and power and he did nothing with them, and that Titus found more offensive than the stupidly bland smile he offered to any who risked talking to him. 

Except now he was doing something, with the so called diplomatic envoys from Galahd, and it was driving Titus up a wall, that no one would tell him what it was. Cor was young and dumb and antisocial, and Titus was willing to believe the only reason Regis kept him around was because he was fucking him, that Cor was nothing more than a pretty trophy Regis kept around in lieu of getting himself a fucking Queen and some heirs to give a future to his dynasty. Nothing else made sense. But then Titus was forced to admit Regis was smarter than that, by miles. Regis had danced politics and blood feuds and anarchy and profound hatred for his father, and still somehow managed to unify Lucis under his banners once more. He always had a plan. An angle. 

Or maybe he was just an idiot who didn’t know how war worked. 

Either way, it was confusing and vexing and it made Titus wish he had committed to treason twenty years ago, three times a day. 

“Maybe you should focus your efforts on Ravatogh,” Clarus suggested, looking over the map with him. 

Clarus was proud and stern and a lot more solid than his father had ever been. Clarus was the kind of Shield the world would have wanted Mors to have, but he was instead in Regis’ service, who refused to let him be a leash and instead used him like a precision tool. 

“Maybe I should go join the Empire instead,” Titus muttered darkly, well aware it was a bratty comment to make, but treason was always his threat of choice to leverage at the crown, and over the years the words had lost their edge and become… well, familiar. Well-worn. 

“I mean you could,” Regis said, sitting on the edge of the desk, staring at the map with a thoughtful twitch in his mouth, “but I’d rather you didn’t.” 

“I’d rather you hadn’t gotten us into this mess in the first place,” Titus said bluntly, and ignored the glare Clarus gave him for his trouble. 

Clarus was loyal to Regis, after all. He always found himself slightly suspicious of Titus if nothing else because Titus was so open about his intentions to get the fuck out of this mess even if treason was required to do so. Titus was horrified by the realization this was just an inside joke, between him and the King, and endeavored not to think about it, lest he was forced to drink himself stupid every time he stumbled upon the thought. 

Regis did not make him feel any better by smiling wryly at him. 

“Ravatogh it is then,” Titus sighed. “And if I don’t come back, don’t assume me dead, expect me to come collect your fucking heads because the Empire has better dental.” 

Clarus’ face went purple, as Titus knew he would. Regis reached out and shoved him, distracting him by the sudden need to make sure he didn’t end up face first on the floor, and gave Titus an amused smile while he nodded meaningfully towards the door. 

Titus was not one not to take an easy out when offered, and stormed out of the room before Clarus could start pontificating on treason and such. 

* * *

The following month, as Titus reviewed supply lines and deployment routes and made preparations to join his men in the front lines around Ravatogh, he couldn’t shake the feeling Cor was up to something, possibly something nefarious if nothing else because Titus had the tendency to expect the worst in situations where he had no reason to expect any good. For all Cor had been letting himself be seen a lot more often than before, he was always surrounded by at least one of the Galahdian envoys that, despite Regis’ assurances of their instrumental importance to the war efforts, seem to do little more than host strange parties for the court and disappear at eerily regular intervals that were explained with rather flimsy stories about expeditions into the regions suffering the worst of the war efforts. 

Titus didn’t like it. 

He didn’t like Cor, on principle, and he didn’t like the Galahdians and their secrecy, and frankly if there was something rotten at the core of the war efforts, he was willing to risk his own right hand to bet Cor had something to do with it. It made perfect sense if one ignored the fact Regis was too smart to get outdone by his own fucktoys. Titus knew better, but he was also tired and annoyed and quickly approaching the point where he no longer _cared_. 

Talking to Cor was always an exercise in patience which Titus no longer really had, and yet, like a fool, he kept trying. 

“Good morning, General Drautos,” Cor said, when he ran into him after Regis’ morning address to the court. 

“Marshal,” Titus shot back, as neutral as he could, and told himself it didn’t really chafe to give the man rank, even if he was clearly twenty years his junior and only had it because the King fancied his pretty face. “Surprising of you, to let us see your face this early in the day.” 

Cor stared at him, blank and vapid, and shrugged. 

“Regis insisted,” he muttered, like it meant something, though given the shadow of teeth just barely visible along the collar of his shirt, Titus supposed it did. 

“Keep it up, Marshal,” Titus said, standing right next to him in the lift, and didn’t even pretend not to be snide, “maybe you’ll clock in a full day at work before the year is over.” 

Cor smiled placidly at him. 

“I doubt it.” 

Titus didn’t punch him for it. He wanted to, of course, but he didn’t. He sort of wished he had, when he received news three days later that one of his supply lines into Cleigne had collapsed and also that Cor and the Galahdians were gone for the week. 

Coincidentally. 

Titus contemplated adding a shot of scotch into his evening tea, but refrained at least until he was done with the day’s crossword puzzle. 

* * *

There was an assassination attempt on Regis, the day after Cor came back with the Galahdians. Titus pretended to be surprised by it, but couldn’t quite manage to be convincing. He was, however, genuinely surprised when he was ambushed by Cor in his office afterwards. 

“I would have thought you wouldn’t let him out of your sight,” Titus said, somewhat lacking sting, if nothing else because he was tired – of Cor, of the war, of everything. 

Cor stared at him like he was speaking in an entirely different language and then seemed to conclude it didn’t matter because he shrugged at him. 

“He’s fine,” he said, like Titus gave one solitary fuck on the matter, “he wants to see you as soon as Clarus is done panicking. So perhaps an hour or so.” 

Titus reckoned that gave him enough time to make some tea, study his plans for Ravatogh and perhaps eat some lunch. 

Instead he ended up getting into something of a spat, with Cor, over tea of all things. 

Titus refused to accept Cor was better at brewing tea than he was. It was ludicrous thing to be fixated on. Even if might have some measure of truth to it. 

Later that night, when he finally made it home after six hours talking war tactics with Regis and Clarus, Titus laid in bed and squinted at the paper. 

The three-letter synonym of annoy was not, despite it all, Cor. 

* * *

The next time Titus saw Cor, he was play-fighting with one of the Galahdians in the Crownsguard training rooms, two weeks later. Titus absently sent Regis a message that he wouldn’t be able to join the meeting he was supposed to be in, and instead sat back to watch. He should have gone to that meeting, it was important. He was deploying with the latest reinforcements in the evening, in preparation for an all out attack to try and force the Empire out of the base they’d set up at the feet of Ravatogh. 

But it was rare for Cor to fight at all, though he’d heard these little spars were a more common occurrence these days. Titus found that dubious. Even more dubious than everything else about Cor, which he found dubious just by virtue of being related to Cor at all. 

It was a bit disappointing, to be honest. 

Cor was awkward, with a sword. He swung back and forth, almost like he expected the blade itself to do all the job for him. There was a ghost of a trained hand in his movements, of basics taught in infancy, but mostly forgotten by now. Titus was sure it was only the fact the Galahdian and his knives were ill-suited to match the long range of Cor’s sword that gave him any advantage. If Titus went down there and challenged him, he was sure he’d embarrass the scrawny shit in four seconds flat. He was tempted to do it, more so since he’d found a tin of dry leaves in his desk that morning, with only a note that read _try it, – C_ next to it. 

Titus had thrown the tin out, if only because if he was going to be poisoned, it would take more than that to do it. 

He was disappointed by how mediocre the fight was. Titus had stayed because he expected to gauge some of their skill based on their fight – it took great skill, after all, to fight and appear unskillful to the untrained eye – but there was nothing to gauge there. It wasn’t a serious fight and there was no serious skill on display, and by the end of it he was more interested in joining for the sake of getting them to stop making rookie mistakes, than to unmask some sort of true potential boiling under the surface. The Galahdian boy was quick on his feet but not particularly strong, and rather predictable in his movements. And Cor… Cor needed about twenty years of instruction on how to properly handle a sword. 

Titus was irritated by how much it pissed him off, to realize there really wasn’t anything special about them, as far as their fighting prowess went. If nothing else because it complicated his attempts to pin down the conspiracy around them – and there had to be, it wasn’t just Titus being paranoid, there was something going on and he was going to figure out what it was, no matter what. So they weren’t secretly powerful weapons Regis was using in secret to upset the course of the war. 

But they had to be something. 

They _had_ to. 

And Titus was going to be one to figure it out, if nothing else because spite demanded he did. 

* * *

Ravatogh was a clusterfuck. 

The very night Titus arrived, reinforcements arrived to the enemy base they were supposed to be destroying. Which they had in fact destroyed, he was told, four separate times. The MTs just kept coming back and setting shop up again and the next thing they knew, the base was up and running once more. It was getting ridiculous. 

Titus was the sort of person who thought the world was meant to make sense, that once you took out the impossibilities, everything that remained was fact and would eventually fit into place if you took enough time to study it with care. He couldn’t remember where he’d read that, but it’d stuck with him, all his life. He was methodical and thorough and pragmatical to the point of being treacherous if the alternative was madness. He was keenly aware of where the lines where and how much it’d cost for him to actually cross them. He wasn’t a fanatic, following after Regis out of blind adoration, like Clarus. He fought for his country because he was fairly sure the alternative was to start digging his own grave, and even then not to have the certainty he’d land in it before it was all over. 

There was something, in that base, that was valuable enough to not be abandoned, even when they managed to destroy it. Anything else didn’t make sense, and Titus loathed things that didn’t make sense. 

He was almost smug, when on the fourth assault, after a long, taxing fight, the entire base blew up as whatever had been buried deep beneath it, charging up on power directly from the volcano’s heat, erupted alongside the debris. He was almost smug, and then he took in his men, flagging after the intense fight, shaken by the sight of the monstrous armor deploying out of the ruins. 

“Son of a bitch,” Titus muttered under his breath, summoned a sword out of crystals and took the lead at the head of the remaining forces. “For Lucis!” He cried out, because he knew for a fact his men were not bitter, cynical assholes more interested in self-preservation than glory and because, well, it was fitting, for those to be his last words. 

Life loved that kind of irony. 

* * *

It might have been an hour, after the first clash. It might have been three. Titus found himself among the last men standing, trapped between a rock wall leading up the mountain and whatever the fuck monstrosity the Nifs had grown underground. It didn’t even look that much different from the other armors they occasionally deployed to guard their bases. It was pale blue and just a sliver taller, but it shrugged off everything they threw at it. 

Everything. 

Titus knew he was a dead man walking when an idiot kid took off with most of their remaining explosives and blew up himself less than three feet beneath the fucker’s leg, and the explosion didn’t even scratch the paint job. 

Titus knew he was a dead man walking but he didn’t want to be the sort to meekly wait death to meet him. He was going to go down fighting. He was also going to go down swearing Regis’ name up and down, until his stupid ears bled. It was only fair. He clenched his grip on his sword and shifted his weight, preparing to dash in and try to make some dent into the fucking thing, maybe cause enough of a distraction and buy the other survivors – who clearly were neither stupid nor crazy nor spiteful as Titus – a chance to run away. 

That was the idea, anyway. 

That was not what happened. 

What actually happened was that Titus noticed the sky had gone dark, at some point, past dusk and into night. And then he felt it, a shiver crawling up his spine as temperature dropped twenty solid degrees and made the breath mist in front of his mouth, so it was not just nerves playing tricks on his mind. 

“Run,” Titus said, mouth working before his brain finished catching up, as the shadows reshaped in the distance into a frighteningly familiar figure that advanced on their enemy with slow, purposeful steps. “ _Run and don’t look back_ ,” Titus snarled, turning to his men, but they ignored him, staring at the frost spreading thin over the ground, causing steam to raise from the edges where the volcano’s veins ran open to the surface. “You-” 

The Hound – not a dog, Titus thought quietly, stupidly, endlessly loud against the dead silence inside his head, a _wolf_ – stopped as the MT troopers turned their fire on it and ignored it like it was nothing more than the pelting of rain. 

Then the blue eyes glowed, ominous and brighter than the moon above their heads, and the fur around its shoulders hardened into crystal that glowed the same eerie, cursed light. Temperature dropped another twenty degrees and Titus refused to let his teeth clatter out of spite. He felt more than saw his men huddle behind him, though he doubted he would be much protection in the face of that monster, and watched in mute horror as the creature tilted its head back and howled loud and sinister into the sky. 

Dark clouds rolled in, blanketing them in darkness that made the edges of the wolf’s being blur, almost impossible to make out properly beyond the glowing eyes and the crystal growing like tumors on its back. When lightning began to fall, hammering the earth with precise, devastating blows, it was impossible to not believe the Hound was responsible for it, more so when each hit left behind a crater in the neat rows of MT soldiers trying to circle the wolf and do more than become chirring wrecks left behind. 

Then the large MT armor that Titus had, up until that point, assumed was going to be the end of him, leaped forward, chainsaws whirring loudly as it targeted the Hound and took a swung at its head. 

The Hound opened its jaws and a torrent of ice and snow came rolling out, howling like a screech of despair, and not only did it stop the monstrous machine in its tracks, it clogged it with icicles spontaneously growing on it. Then the Hound ducked his head and tackled the armor with the bulk of its side, sending it crashing into the mountain’s solid rock wall. 

Titus waited and waited for the armor to bounce right back up, as it had after everything him and his men had thrown at it before, but it blew up instead, self-destructing in an explosion so violent it shook the ground and threatened to wake up the volcano. 

The Hound howled again, loud and terrifying, and the sky delivered a dozen or so more bolts of lightning, until all that was left of the base and the MTs was ruined bits of metal that sometimes let out a rain of sparks that illuminated the profound darkness all around. But this time temperature raised instead, sweat gathering at Titus’ brow, as the Hound’s eyes glowed and it stared intently at the smoke plume atop Ravatogh. 

A minute, an hour or an eternity later, Titus was not sure, time had lost all meaning by that point, the rumbling of the volcano ceased as the Hound’s eyes stopped glowing quite so brightly. The crystals on its back shattered into light as it stretched its back lazily, the gesture frighteningly mundane. It swept its gaze – sharp blue eyes, icy and clear, _intelligent_ – across the plain, and clearly noticed that all that remained was Titus and his handful of terrified survivors. 

The storm clouds cleared, then, allowing the moon and the stars to pour pale light on them again. 

The Hound shook itself, like a dog coming out of water, and then turned to leave. 

Just like that. 

Titus heard his heartbeat thundering between his ears, stuck somewhere in his throat, and took a step forward, not quite sure what to do next. 

“Wait.” 

It took the Hound turning around for Titus to realize he’d been the one to speak. And then, coming face to face with the creature – it looked… it looked almost harmless, from up close, except for its size, but it looked so much like tame dog that Titus’ brain kept skipping over its size – Titus found himself at a loss for words for the first time in his life. He struggled to find what to say – clearly, it understood when it was spoken to, since it had not only stopped but come back to him, when called, eyes sharp and clever in ways that made Titus’ mouth go dry – considering it had just saved his life. Saved his men, too, who were now approaching slowly, cautious but curious and also a little awed. Despite being soldiers in service of the King and having some of the King’s magic accessible to them, none of them had ever witnessed magic on this scale before. Neither had Titus, of course, but that was besides the point. 

It’d conjured lightning and a blizzard and calmed an erupting volcano with just a glare. 

And, perhaps most important of all, it hadn’t killed them, just their enemies, with such a deliberate care it was impossible to not notice. 

The Hound snorted, after a moment, seemingly tired of waiting for Titus to say his piece. And then it leaned in, and licked him, tongue as wide as Titus’ torso, swiping his entire body in one swift movement that lifted Titus off his feet and left him falling on his ass, covered in slobber. 

Then it turned and started walking again, vanishing into the darkness. 

Titus wasn’t even mad, at that point. 

* * *


	5. a humble servant

* * *

_a humble servant_

* * *

Most days, Prompto got up about two hours before dawn. Things needed tidying up, after all, and someone had to look over breakfast and make sure everything was ready for the day’s agenda. It was all a matter of being organized and disciplined, and he had good years of practice on that. It was hard work, but he didn’t mind it, because it was purposeful work, the kind that had a clear goal and simple expectations to meet. 

And there were always the little pleasures in life, like throwing open the thick, heavy curtains in the Princess’ room and hear her whine like a wounded thing when the glass windows followed suit and the chill of the morning rampaged into the room almost like a physical thing. 

“You’re _evil_ ,” Luna told him, peering at him over the rim of her covers, massive pout noticeable in her tone, but safely hidden away from sight. “The worst. Ever.” 

“I love you too,” Prompto replied, eyebrows arched and easy grin hanging off his lips. He looked at his tablet and snickered. “Also, morning prayers started five minutes ago. You’re doing a great job leading them, by the way.” He paused significantly, as Luna spluttered. “From bed.” He didn’t bother to look away as she scrambled off from under the covers and seemingly tried to reach out for the clothes neatly set on a chair by the wall while at the same time trying to pull off her sleeping clothes, all the while trying not to upset her hair more than sleep already had. “Mostly naked, too!” Prompto went on, amused, as he folded the tablet under one arm and watched her somehow squirm into an acceptably formal dress in under two minutes. “That’s new.” 

“The worst!” Luna accused, giving up on the zipper along her back – Prompto stepped up to zip it up – while she undid her braid and studied the frizzy mess atop her head for a moment, before she unceremoniously wrapped it all up into a bun. “Thank you,” she added, as she stepped back and deemed herself… well, mostly presentable. 

It was five in the morning – well, five ten at this point – no one was really awake enough to really tell the difference. Probably. 

She hoped. 

“Ahem,” Prompto said, clearing his throat dramatically just as she hurried towards the door. 

Luna looked back and realized he had her trident in hand, one eyebrow arched and an insufferably teasing smile on his lips. 

“Oh, right,” she muttered, closing her eyes and rushing back for it. “Thank you,” she said, turning away, before turning back again, leaning in and pressing her lips to his cheek. “Still evil, though!” 

“Shoo,” Prompto said, snickering, waving a hand at her. “Go be holy or something.” 

Now, he thought, somewhat despairingly, all that was left was Ravus. 

...well, that was what Pryna and Umbra were for. 

* * *

“Pretty sure you won, Your Highness.” 

Prompto smiled wryly when Ravus looked up from the wreck that were the practice dummies, and glowered threateningly at him. And then, because this was Ravus, who was always solemn and grim right up until he wasn’t, and then he was poignantly childish purely because whoever witnessed it would never be believed… 

Ravus held Prompto’s stare with his own even as he purposely stabbed the fallen log with his sword, bolts of magic crackling alongside the blade. 

“Victory is solely dependent on the parameters set beforehand,” Ravus said, in that haughty tone of his that only really came out when he’d been flustered or humiliated, and he didn’t know how to get it out of his system without coming across as petty or undignified. 

Prompto, who’d spent a good deal of his life feeling flustered and humiliated, often at the same time, gave him an amused if sympathetic smile, and shrugged. 

“I mean, that sounds an awful lot like Master Eisleigh’s lecturing,” Prompto said with a little shrug, “which is fine and all, but personally I’m all up for victory that includes chocolate.” 

“Dangerous information to divulge so easily,” Ravus said, but it lacked the usual curtness of an actual chiding remark, so Prompto knew he was mostly teasing. “Someone might use it to their advantage.” 

“Is it really their advantage, though?” Prompto wondered, head tilted to the side. “I mean, I get chocolate. By all accounts, I’m the winner in that scenario.” 

Ravus sighed. It was loud and put-upon and endlessly amusing because of it. 

“Is there a reason I’m being subjected to your abysmal wit, or are you just drowning in so much leisure time, you’ve decided to grace me with it?” 

“Rude,” Prompto snorted, shaking his head, “and Her Majesty asked you to grace the dinner table with your presence… twenty minutes ago.” 

Ravus made a very impolite noise and then glided away with that long-stride pace of his that was somehow not as undignified as breaking into a dead run, but still kind of felt like one. Prompto preferred to make sure he was never late for anything, as opposed to try and run to places in a way that didn’t make him look sloppy, since his legs were short and he couldn’t run up stairs four steps at the time time. The manor was mostly stairs. It was terrible design, in Prompto’s opinion, but no one cared for his opinion, so he kept his grumping to himself and those nights Luna had nightmares and needed someone to lie in bed with her and tell her funny stories until she could fall asleep again. She always thought everything that made Prompto disgruntled was funny. 

Prompto stared up at the sky, starts starting to dot it as the chill of the night rolled into the canyons around the manor and oozing up into the valley above. He was glad for what little time he still had to himself, because it helped him keep things in perspective. But he also hated the fact it only highlighted the tension under the surface. The war was taking its toll on everyone, and everyone needed to do their part to keep the peace. Luna was leading more and more prayer sessions, and the whispers following Ravus grew more insistent, questioning when he’d do them proud and join the Imperial Army. Prompto was just a shadow scurrying in the background, keeping tabs on schedules and passing along orders to older, more experienced servants who actually knew how to carry them out. No one expected anything from him. No one wanted anything from him, except for him to get out of the way and let the people who actually mattered, do what they’d been destined to do. 

And yet, that wasn’t quite it. 

In his heart of hearts, Prompto still woke up every morning, so early it might still be night, and hoped to receive news that the Emperor had seen sense. That the war with Lucis was over and everything would immediately go back to those days of his childhood, when he trailed after the Princess as they played in the fields of sylleblossoms and tried to teach Umbra and Pryna how to fetch properly. 

It would never happen, he knew, but he still hoped. He still wanted. And it was selfish of him, since he wasn’t the one suffering the worst of the war. He wasn’t the one starving or dying, getting stomped on by the Imperial MT troops marching across the Empire in neat little lines, like ants. He had no love for Lucis, but no hate for it either. He was indifferent to the land that saw the Gods die, and their crystal and their prophecy come to naught. It was a rare sentiment, that, in Tenebrae in general, and the manor in particular. Prompto still had memories of the prior Oracle, who died cursing the Lucis Caelum line and wishing all sorts of ills and evils upon them, for their hand in the vanishing of the gods. A lot of the servants and the lords and the ladies and the people who came every day to plead for the Oracle’s mercy… a lot of them felt that way, too. 

Prompto quietly thought that if the gods could vanish as a result of human meddling, maybe they weren’t all that great in the first place. But he was very careful to keep that thought to himself. A certain level of piety was expected of him, even if it was more performance than anything else. He fiddled with the chain hanging off his neck, staring at the sky. The chill of winter was settling in soon – the Glacian’s corpse laid stewn at the heart of the Empire, and all of Niflheim, from Gralea to Paddra cowered under a winter that lasted three fourths of the year – and soon the flowers would wither and vanish under the snow. 

And then the tablet buzzed in his hands, and he sighed with a little smile. 

Apparently, he too was expected to grace dinner with his presence. 

* * *

Prompto liked Her Majesty quite a bit. She was kind and gracious and _good_ in a way that had nothing at all to do with her title as Oracle, and everything with the kind of person she was. Sylva Nox Fleuret had inhered a throne no one thought needed to exist anymore, with the gods gone and the scourge and its daemons gone with them. She had, nonetheless, made her throne worthwhile. It was precisely because the gods had gone silent, that the world needed her guidance more than ever. The Oracle was meant to be the guiding light that showed the way, even amidst the darkest night. 

She was also on occasion batshit insane in ways that reminded Prompto rather keenly where her children had learned it from. 

“We’re going _where_?” He asked, more a squawk than anything else, because there were six solid feet of snow outside the manor, the sun hadn’t been seen properly in two weeks, and he’d just been told the most ludicrous thing imaginable. 

“Insomnia,” Her Majesty said, patient and kind and unfairly amused by the look of uncomprehending horror plastered all over Prompto’s face. “Regis has made accommodations to receive you all. He’s even sent a proper escort to make sure your journey is safe.” 

“His Majesty Regis Lucis Caelum,” Prompto pointed out, squinting, “the King of Lucis, with whom the Empire is currently at war.” 

Prompto fancied the Queen was laughing at him, without doing something so crass as to openly cackle at his despair. 

“Yes,” she said, eyes dancing. 

Prompto waited and waited and waited for her to explain some more, but she didn’t. Instead she sighed a well-meaning sigh and reached out to pull him into a hug. It took him a moment, before he relaxed enough to realize he’d found himself at the edge of a panic attack. He breathed in deeply, the way she’d taught him how, when he’d been smaller and prone to cry about everything. 

“Regis is not his father,” she said, and left the words hanging, ominous, and Prompto closed his eyes and refused to complete the sentence out of sheer self-preservation. “The war will end. And when it does, the manor will no longer be safe. Insomnia will be a good place to wait for the storm to settle. Until then, I trust Regis to keep you all three safe and sound. Can I trust you to keep Luna and Ravus safe?” 

Prompto did not scream, though he was tempted. He also didn’t puke, because that would be rude, on top of undignified. 

“I can try?” 

“That’s all I ask,” the Queen said, pulling back and resting her hands on his shoulders, smiling gently at him. “Luna and Ravus will be alone in a strange place. I trust Regis, but I don’t trust his countrymen. So I ask you to balance Luna’s good will with due shrewdness, that she not be turned into a pawn, in Regis’ court. And I ask you to rein in Ravus’ temper like you know best how.” 

“No pressure, right?” Prompto said, weak smile on his face. 

“You have an advantage over them,” the Queen said, reassuring, and though Prompto was pretty sure nothing could make his lot seem reassuring in anyway… he still felt soothed by her voice. “They won’t know you’re there. Do make a point to keep it that way.” 

Prompto took a deep breath. And then another. And then he looked up at her, frowning ever so slightly. 

“May I ask why you’d put your faith in him, Your Majesty?” He asked, and he was rather proud of himself for how nice and even his voice sounded, even though he was still screeching in a sustained note in the back of his head. “He’s… he’s a Lucian King.” 

And Prompto remembered, keenly, fiercely, terribly, the previous Oracle, withered and old and furious, spitting out curses at the sky. 

“He is,” she said, nodding slowly. “But he is both shrewd and a good man. It is not easy to walk that balance, and yet Regis has made it his life mission to do so. He gave me his word, that my children would be safe under his care. And I believe him purely because he would not be King if his word were not sacred. Not after what his father did.” 

Prompto was silent for a long moment. And then he gave up pretenses and walked over to the small side table and set about serving tea. It was a good compulsion for someone like him, that need to serve others when he couldn’t make sense of his head. It was easier to focus on what others wanted or needed, than trying to actively figure out what was going on inside his mind. The Queen knew this and didn’t berate him, sitting back on an ornate armchair made of that buttery white wood that apparently only grew in the forests surrounding Gralea. 

“My Lucian is passable, I suppose,” Prompto muttered uneasily, offering her a cup, and then collapsing on the floor at her feet. “And so is Luna’s. Ravus’ isn’t exactly grand, but he’ll make do. And… everything else. Well.” Prompto blinked, and felt weirdly warmed when he noticed her smiling behind her cup. “Have you told them yet, Your Majesty?” 

The Queen smiled and reached a hand down to finger his hair. 

“I thought you’d like to do the honors with me.” 

Prompto took the shriek under his ribs and twisted it around until it came out as something of a laugh. 

“Of course, Your Majesty.” 

* * *

The Lucian escort was rather underwhelming in person. Person as in, singular. One person. 

His name was Cor Leonis and his Gralean was spotty in places, with a weird sing-song-ish accent that Luna found probably more amusing than she should. Ravus didn’t like him, but then Ravus had had the exact same reaction as Prompto had, to the news of their trip to Insomnia, and he was allowed to stick to it, instead of trying to find the bright side to it. Cor looked maybe a couple years older than Prompto himself, which meant he was about as old as Ravus was, only… drier and less expressive. He didn’t seem very impressive, either, but the Queen had taken one good look at him and nodded solemnly. Prompto didn’t know what to think about that, so he endeavored not to think about it at the moment. 

The fact they were literally sneaking out of Tenebrae in the middle of a war was a constant source of anxiety for Prompto, that he had to swallow so far down neither Luna nor Ravus noticed much. Luna was determined to make friends with the surly Lucian, who was not so much surly as deadly quiet and painfully deadpan when he wasn’t, so Prompto abused the fact she was distracted to keep his freakouts to himself. Ravus, on the other hand, was a man on a mission and that mission was to be distrustful and irritable to be borderline unbearable, but at least that gave Prompto something to do that wasn’t curling up into a little ball and hyperventilate until his lungs stopped hurting. 

“I’m sorry if I’ve offended you,” Prompto told Cor in the wee hours of the morning, as he accompanied him around the docks in search for a boat that would take them to Lucis. “I didn’t mean to.” 

Of course this meant they’d left Ravus and Luna alone in the shabby hotel they were holing up for the night, which was terrible, but Prompto trusted Luna to not make a scene and Ravus to murder anything that would. They’d be fine. Fine. 

Cor stopped abruptly. So much so Prompto found himself walking into his back, making a strangled noise in the back of his throat, and then jumping back as if scalded, staring wide eyed up at the man. 

“You haven’t offended me,” Cor told him, though his declination was for the wrong gender. Prompto wasn’t suicidal enough to point it out, though. “What are you talking about?” 

“Oh,” Prompto said, shrinking back. “I’m sorry. It’s just… it feels like you dislike me a lot. I… hope I have not given cause to it.” 

Cor stared down at him, pale blue eyes even paler than Prompto’s own – Luna liked to tease him about it, about his name and his eyes – and much heavier too. 

“I dislike that you’re lying,” Cor told him, in that blunt, musical accent of his, and Prompto swallowed hard and did his best to pretend the floor hadn’t just dropped from under his feet. He opened his mouth and got interrupted before he could figure out what to reply to that. “I can smell it. The deceit.” 

“It’s not deceit,” Prompto murmured, looking down at his feet. “It’s a secret.” 

Cor stared and stared and then shrugged, so Prompto allowed himself to breathe again, as he followed him around. Cor let him translate when the conversation got trickier, or the dialects got convoluted, and by the time they were heading back to meet with Ravus and Luna, they’d secured themselves passage on a ship. Prompto knew Luna looked at the whole ordeal like an adventure, and despite his determination to be miserable about it, in a way, so did Ravus. He envied their ability to do so. He missed the manor and the safe, comfortable routines in it. He missed knowing his place in the world. 

He felt weird about their rundown cover, when compared to the solemn luxury of the manor, and he hated himself for it. The world was a scary place, and he’d always known it, but it was one thing to sit with lessons and keep the Queen’s children company, and another entirely to stare at it in the face and be expected to not flinch, because he was supposed to be a servant and not care. Or maybe he was expected to care more than he did. Either way...either way he was not enjoying the trip and the crust of icy cold dread in his insides at the thought of reaching Insomnia was not at all helped by the fact their appointed guide just claimed to be able to smell _lies_. 

“Do they know?” Cor asked him, before they reached the hotel, quiet and solemn, a tiny frown tugging between his brows. He nodded up, in the general direction of the room where they’d left their companions behind for the night. “About your secret.” 

Prompto swallowed hard and nodded very slowly. 

“Yes.” 

Cor’s frown deepened. 

“Does Regis?” 

And that was the thing, wasn’t it? That was the crux of it. Because the Oracle trusted the King of Lucis with her children, but did she also trust him with… well, him? Prompto didn’t know. She hadn’t told him anything for certain, other than Regis’ word was sacred and no one else in Lucis was trustworthy like him. Or maybe that meant she didn’t know anyone else she could trust in Lucis. He’d spent the better part of the two months it took them to cross Tenebrae and reach Paddra to come to that conclusion and it didn’t make him feel any better. 

“I don’t know,” Prompto said, trying his best to not sound as miserable as he actually felt at the prospect – either was bad, though not quite as bad. “Her Majesty wouldn’t say.” 

Cor frowned. 

“If you secret hurts him, I will kill you,” he said, and it didn’t matter he’d fudged the tense, because Prompto was struck by the certainty that he meant every word. More so when Cor sighed and added: “I hope it doesn’t come to that.” 

Prompto swallowed hard. 

“Why?” 

Cor shrugged. 

“Because you’re a good kid, otherwise,” he said, with the sort of certainty Her Majesty always did. 

_Otherwise._

Prompto felt his eyes sting with tears and he couldn’t quite explain why. The fact Cor noticed and then gave him enough time to collect himself only made it worse. He spent most of the morning curled up in a ball, lying in bed between Luna and Ravus, until it was time to leave. 

When it turned out that the boat made him seasick, he was infinitely grateful for the excuse to avoid Cor entirely. 

* * *

Lucis was hot. 

Really hot. 

Melt the flesh off your bones sort of hot. 

Prompto was horrified by the weather – insane heat followed by stupidly long thunderstorms and chilly nights, for no damn reason apparently – and almost willing to join Ravus’ bandwagon of hating everything about the trip on principle, when they reached Duscae. Getting to Duscae was an exercise in patience and caution, considering there were skirmishes everywhere and they got their fair chance to see the war in earnest. Prompto choked on bile all the way until they reached the farms and then he realized Duscae was his favorite place in the entire world. 

Duscae had chocobos. 

Chocobos were objectively the best thing in the world and clearly no matter how weirdly fucked up the weather, any land that had chocobos in it had to be good. 

“I wonder if they’re edible,” Ravus wondered as they set up camp atop an old, dead haven. 

“Why would to _say_ that?” Prompto asked, scandalized. 

Ravus stared down at him for a moment, considering, but thankfully Cor interrupted whatever horrible thing he’d meant to say. 

“They’re not,” Cor said, deadpan, as he tended to the fire pit at the center of the rock slab. “Flesh’s bitter as hell and just not worth the hassle.” 

“It concerns me that you know that,” Prompto said, lips twitching when Cor snorted at him, “like… _a lot_.” 

Cor stared up at him, unblinking as the fire roared to life under his hands. There was something definitely… _off_ about Cor, but Prompto couldn’t quite put his finger on it. He was quiet and deadpan and not very expressive, but he wasn’t mean. He wasn’t cruel and he certainly took care that, though he was taking them on a trek across half the known world, the pace he set wasn’t too hard on any of them. It was just… he was _weird_ , in tiny, select ways that Prompto wasn’t sure he could articulate. 

“May I ask a question, Mr. Leonis?” Luna asked, breaking the tension entirely as she went to sit next to him by the fire. “Why are we camping on havens?” 

She left the rest of the question hanging, though Luna had that miraculous ability – that Prompto frankly envied her for – to not make it ominous but rather kind, when she did. Havens were dead chunks of rock scattered upon the land, the blessings of the Oracles of yore and the blood of the old Kings of Lucis, all withered away when the Crystal was shattered. It was just another reminder of that terrible moment, when the Gods and all things holy had abandoned the world in disgust. Or at least that was the version of the story told in Tenebrae, particularly by the prior Oracle. Prompto was suddenly assaulted by the notion that Lucis might have a different perspective on the matter. He knew Gralea did, if nothing else because it had been the previous Emperor who’d orchestrated the whole thing. Or so they said. 

“Monsters avoid havens, so they’re safer to camp in,” Cor explained, putting water to boil above the flames. 

One of the most interesting things about Cor, in Prompto’s humble opinion, was the fact he had magic. Functional at that. Luna and Ravus had magic, like their parents before them had: Luna had the golden twinge of light that all Oracles did, and Ravus had more… straightforward power, lightning dancing at his fingertips on command. Cor’s magic was mundane by comparison. He kept all their stuff neatly tucked away in a crystal void, always a mere twitch of his hand away. It made traveling much easier than Prompto had originally dreaded, though at the same time, he was keenly aware they had traded the effort of hauling their luggage with them, for being entirely at his mercy. 

“But havens are useless now,” Ravus said, with that blunt carelessness of his that never failed to make Prompto wince and wish he was better at choosing his words. “Why would they care?” 

“Monsters aren’t daemons,” Cor replied, calm and patient, dropping tea leaves into the water pot. They drank tea with every meal, but it was good tea so no one had complained about it so far. Not even Ravus. “They don’t care if havens are harmful to them or not, they remember they used to be. So they avoid them. They’ve been avoiding them for centuries, so I reckon we’ve still got a while before they figure out they don’t have to, anymore.” 

“You seem to know an awful lot about monsters,” Ravus said, and Prompto knew he didn’t mean it rudely, but it came out that way, somewhere between accusatory and suspicious. 

Cor didn’t seem to mind, because he simply shrugged. 

“How long until we reach Insomnia?” Luna asked, because you could always trust Luna to defuse a situation without being overt about it. 

Cor stared up at the sky. 

“Soon.” 

* * *

Insomnia was terrifying. 

There was a car waiting for them, when they reached the bridge and it drove them into the city proper. Its driver was a tall, scowling man who’d taken ten solid seconds to scowl thunderously at Cor before nudging them all into the car. Prompto found himself sitting between Luna and Ravus in the back of the car, while Cor took the passenger seat at the front and spoke in smooth Lucian and a low voice with the driver. Prompto kept expecting the city to end and it kept not being _done_. Buildings and streets and parks and so many _people_. He’d never seen so many people in a single place at the same time. Their short stay in Lestallum had been eye-opening, considering imperial propaganda of the state of Lucis claimed they were a technologically backwards society stuck in the dark ages. Prompto had been impressed by the sprawling mess of a city _that_ was, and thought Insomnia could not be much bigger than that. 

He’d been wrong, clearly. 

Insomnia was what history books had taught Prompto Gralea should be. Must be. Except all history books he’d ever read talked about Gralea in extensive, exquisite detail – if he closed his eyes, he could almost see it in his mind – but Insomnia was nothing but a footnote at most. Insomnia, in the flesh, so to speak, did not feel like a footnote. At all. 

It was a three hour drive into the heart of the city, a massive tower structure that loomed over a landscape of already enormous buildings. Prompto didn’t know what to expect, considering they were rough from the road, but there was no great ceremony, as they were flagged past the tall, gated walls without a second look – the men guarding the gates briefly saluted formally, in fact – and then sank into the depths of the earth, past ten parking floors and into a large, mostly empty garage where their driver parked them with mathematical precision. 

“I’ll take it from here,” Cor said, in that same flat, toneless voice that Prompto had grown used to, during their trip. 

“Of course you will,” their driver said, staring down at Cor with an almost imperceptible twitch in his eyelid, before he shook his head and stormed away without another word. 

“I would have liked to thank him,” Luna pointed out, eyebrows arched, “for the drive.” 

“He wouldn’t have appreciated it,” Cor explained, in the tones of one who knew that from personal experience. “The King is waiting.” 

“Are we meeting him now?” Prompto asked, blinking and then unconsciously casting a look over at his companions and their equally… not meet-the-King-that-could-potentially-hold-them-hostage clothes. 

“Yes?” Cor replied, though Prompto thought he sounded somewhat unsure. “Is there a problem?” 

Prompto resisted the urge to give him an alphabetical list. 

“You seem eager to get this over and done with,” Ravus said, in his customary accusatory tones. 

Cor stared down at them, blinking again. 

“Aren’t you?” 

Seeing how they didn’t have a suitable rebuke to that, they let the man guide them into a single elevator placed in the far wall of the garage – there were a handful of cars in it, and most of them looked gorgeous even to Prompto’s wholly untrained eye – which he opened with a black keycard. The ride up was nearly twelve minutes long – Prompto counted, because of course he did – uninterrupted, and when the doors finally dinged open, they found a surprisingly cozy studio that wouldn’t have been entirely out of place in the manor. The floors were dark wood, shiny with polish – Prompto winced in sympathy for whoever had to shine them, he only shined hardwood when he’d spoken out of turn and he needed to be punished for it – with dark red carpets that complemented the equally dark furniture very well. 

“Your Majesty,” Cor said, with only the barest hint of emotion peeking somewhere behind his voice, and they noticed the man sitting in one of the armchairs. 

Prompto had expected him to look old, like the Emperor, but he didn’t. Not really. His hair was still more dark brown than grey, and his face and his eyes carried a spark of… something that seemed young and shrewd. He stood up, though he wasn’t very tall, just barely taller than Prompto himself, and after a moment of silence sighed loudly and let his shoulders slump somewhat. 

“Cor,” he said, long-suffering, “did you bring them here straight from the road?” 

Cor shrugged indolently and the King laughed, soft and resigned. 

It was a rather pleasant laugh, and Prompto decided he liked it. It would be some time before he could say the same about its owner, though he hoped he would. 

Maybe. 

* * *

Luna and Ravus were introduced to the court as distant cousins to the King, which Prompto knew for a fact they technically were… some fifty generations back, at least. They were given a floor of the Citadel, fairly high up, too – apparently the King lived in the highest floors, and so the higher the better, because Insomnians were crazy people who disregarded basic laws of the universe, like gravity. And then it was almost like life in the manor, only not quite. Because Prompto was allowed everywhere, in the manor. Prompto could talk to anyone, in the manor, and he was always met with well meaning tolerance at the baseline, because he was the Queen’s pet project and the Queen thought of him as one of her children, even if it was well known that he _wasn’t_. 

In Insomnia, he was a servant – he was a servant in the manor too, but there was no implied sneer there – and he was expected to follow the rules set out for servants. He was meant to stand in corners and be as invisible as possible, and whenever Luna or Ravus acknowledged his presence in public, it was always followed by a poignant suggestion by onlookers that they should discipline him better. Which. Yeah. 

At least, he found out later, this meant to dock his pay – but since he wasn’t actually paid anything in the first place, he took it as a chance to get himself a decent allowance – and not something more… barbaric. Prompto kept telling himself to not judge Insomnia on what he knew to be imperial propaganda, but he kept doing it anyway, because it was so deeply embedded into his vision of the world he didn’t know how to take it out until he stumbled upon it and viscerally felt stupid for it. 

He loathed to be made feel stupid, and even more than that, he loathed _being_ stupid. 

Though to be honest if there was one thing he hated more than that, was being startled. 

“Prompto, right?” 

Prompto took one moment to assess the fact his heart was still inside his chest, despite its desperate attempts to claw its way to freedom through his ribs, and then looked up. And _up_. Almost as up as he did when he looked at Ravus – who was tall and dashing in ways that Prompto was above feeling jealous of, of course – and then it took him another moment to realize who he was speaking with. He did not squeak in reply. This was a victory. 

“Lord Amicitia,” Prompto said, and then dropped his eyes to the floor – though, consciously, he did not bow, it was the great concern of all Insomnians who realized this, he was terrible at bowing and Luna and Ravus were terrible for not making him do it right, apparently – almost contrite. “What can I do for you?” 

Through the corner of his eye, Prompto caught sight of the young Lord – who was, _astonishingly_ , five whole years younger and four inches shorter than Ravus – as he grimaced. If Prompto understood it correctly, the man – it felt weird calling someone like him a boy, even if he was closer in age to Prompto than Ravus – was in fact the current heir to the throne of Lucis, despite not being at all related to the current King. It was some weird complex mess about Shields and Kings and Regents that Prompto should probably know more about than he did, but he kept spacing out every time Luna tried to explain it to him. 

He really didn’t look the part. 

He looked… he looked like a warrior of old, from those ancient stories about Kings and Shields that represented the most positive thing Prompto had ever heard about Lucis growing up. He was massive, in all senses of the word, but he didn’t seem aggressive. He didn’t make the tiny screaming voice in the back of Prompto’s head – the one that flipped the fuck out over everything and he lovingly called his sense of self-preservation – scream any louder. He was rather soft spoken, in fact. Very well read, in Ravus’ opinion, which was high praise indeed, considering what a devourer of books the Prince of Tenebrae was, in his spare time. He’d taken Luna out to walk the gardens – because Lucians had gardens inside a skyscraper, because _that_ made sense – and gotten her a vase of sylleblossoms as a gesture of good will, and perhaps a subtle hint that he had been trusted with their true identities, without being so crass as to speak it out loud. 

“You don’t… you can use my name, you know,” the young Lord said, and Prompto had the weirdest feeling he was feeling flustered. “I mean, I know the whole pompous ceremony has a time and a place, but when it’s just your...” He waved his hands a bit ineffectively. “You and me,” he settled, after a moment, frowning. “It’s okay. Hell, call me Gladio. Luna said you’re like a brother to them, and I don’t want to be an ass.” 

Prompto dearly wished to take him at his word. He really did. He seemed like an alright sort of person – none of the other servants in the Citadel had terrible gossip to share about him, unlike literally everyone else except maybe the King himself – and Prompto knew for a fact Luna and Ravus were steadily warming up to him. 

He didn’t want to be stupid. 

And he knew better than to leave himself open to reprimands, or do anything that would reflect badly on his siblings. He was, after all, a servant. Servants did not speak up like equals to Lords and Ladies, at least not Lucian ones, it seemed. 

“I’d dare not imply such familiarity, my Lord,” Prompto murmured, perfectly docile, and refused to feel guilty when Gladio visibly deflated. 

“...that’s alright,” he said, gracious nonetheless, “anyway, just. I wanted to introduce you to someone.” 

Prompto stomped on the urge to flee, though he cataloged his exits just in case. 

“That’s… very kind of you,” he said instead, more a hope than a reality, since he had no idea who that might be. 

“I hope so,” Gladio said, somewhat awkwardly, raising a hand to rub the back of his neck. “I just… I figured the King had given you leeway to look after your… masters as you would, back home, but it can’t be easy to figure out how to do it here, right? The Citadel is...” He fumbled for words for a moment, before he snorted. “Big fucking bureaucratic nightmare, really.” Gladio smiled when Prompto couldn’t quite swallow the laugh, wry and weirdly shy. “But I… have a friend, who knows the ins and outs pretty well. He’s… kind of like you, really. He grew up in all of this, though he isn’t sworn to any Lady or Lord, yet. I figured he could be a good liason for you, to help you navigate how things are done here, if you need anything to make Luna or Ravus feel more at home during their stay.” 

Prompto, who’d already spent more time than he cared to admit indulging in cathartic sobbing over ridiculous paperwork, did not throw himself at his feet in gratitude. He considered it, but knew better than to give in to the impulse. 

“Oh. That… yes,” he said, instead, brightening up and getting a brighter smile in return, “that would be lovely.” 

“His name is Iggy… Ignis,” Gladio corrected himself, shrugging. “I’m sure you two will get along.” 

Prompto hoped so, at least. 

* * *

Ignis, it turned out, was apparently what happened when you caffeinated a clerk to the point of paroxysm and then stripped away any protective coating insulating the world from the razor sharp edge of their wit. 

Luna snickered and told him he had a crush. 

Prompto flushed, spluttered and told her exactly where to stuff the berry tarts Ignis had helped him get her, when she’d started to get homesick. 

Ravus snickered about it. 

Prompto told him where to stuff it too. 

Still, he went right back to spending all time he didn’t in their company, parked right in the quiet, tiny office Ignis commanded as his own. He was the ward of some very important Lady of the court – an actual cousin of the King, apparently – but whether he’d be named her heir or allowed to pursue a different path, it was still up in the air. Instead of worrying about such things, Ignis focused instead on being the best at whatever task he had at hand. And he was. He was also witty in a callous way that Prompto always felt terrible for laughing at, and he treated Prompto with a sort of kindred courtesy that was… nice. 

Really nice. 

He even complimented Prompto on his Lucian, and wasn’t cruel when he corrected him on tiny nuances about it. 

“You’re thinking again,” Ignis told him, as they sat together and studied a fabric sample book. 

There was going to be a ball, by the end of the month. Something to celebrate new year – even though new year was still months away, either way – in accordance to the traditions of a specific region of Lucis that, from what Prompto understood, was more of an independent nation, like Accordo or Tenebrae, than a region itself. There was apparently a diplomatic envoy currently stationed in the Citadel, and the ball was an attempt to honor their traditions, which seemed to be wildly different from those in the mainland. Even though Insomnia itself was not a mainland but an island. Prompto was long past arguing geography with Ignis on that point, admittedly. 

Ignis hated them. 

Viscerally. 

Prompto found his rancor rather entertaining, considering it stemmed from the fact they made things difficult and had thus far forced Ignis to strain himself to keep up appearances of perfection. When Prompto had simply suggested Ignis stopped, he’d been given a betrayed, venomous look and only an offer of Ignis’ favorite coffee the morning after had managed to soften the betrayal. 

“Well, you know, I do have all this brain,” Prompto told him, waving his hands around his head, “I might as well use it sometimes.” 

“But only sometimes,” Ignis replied, somewhat dryly. “What are you plotting this time?” 

“Well, not world domination, clearly,” Prompto muttered with a slight pout that never failed to make the corner of Ignis’ mouth twitch in amusement. “I was just thinking, Mr. Leonis was very gracious to us, on the trip to Insomnia. I think it’d be good manners to… show our appreciation.” 

“Mr. Leonis?” Ignis asked, frowning, and then let his frown deepen as he asked, just a tad strangled, “you mean the _Marshal_?” 

Prompto blinked. 

“I guess?” He shrugged. “I just… I don’t know what would be a good gift.” 

“Most people don’t know he _exists_ ,” Ignis retorted, more a mutter than anything else. “Never mind what he actually likes.” 

Prompto considered a moment, and then smiled. Immediately, Ignis frowned. 

“Oh, don’t give me that look,” Prompto laughed, shaking his head. “If it’s impossible, it’s impossible,” he said, somewhere between teasing and wry. 

Ignis snorted. 

“We’ll see about that.” 

* * *

Prompto was not entirely surprised – just very impressed, mind – when about a week later, Ignis delivered him a nice tin box of very expensive tea and directions to the Royal Hunting Grounds. It had to be capitalized, apparently. That’s how it was written in the records that Ignis had dug out from dead gods only knew where. The directions were very precise, actually. He found the cabin in the woods – why the hell where there woods in the middle of a city the size of a small continent, Prompto wanted to ask someone, preferably whoever was responsible, though he suspected they were long dead at that point – right next to a lovely, pristine lake. 

He even found Mr. Leonis, who opened the door when he knocked, and took the gift from Prompto’s hands with just a modicum of consideration that Prompto was willing to believe was the result of the good will he’d accrued during their journey together. 

It was all very good and lovely, really, except for the fact Mr. Leonis had very pointedly opened the door stark naked and hadn’t seemed to realize there was anything wrong with that whatsoever. And really? As far as Prompto was aware, by weird, convoluted Lucian social mores, there probably wasn’t! 

Because Lucian. 

“Did he like the tea?” Ignis asked him, later that day, after he’d made his way back into the Citadel and into the cushy armchair he’d sort of claimed as his own in Ignis’ office. 

“Probably, yes,” Prompto replied, taking a cup of that same tea – Ignis was the ward of a very important, very rich Lady and he had habits to match, it seemed – as he curled up into a tiny ball and tried to order his face to stop burning. “I mean, he accepted it.” 

“He didn’t invite you in?” Ignis asked, frowning as if offended on Prompto’s behalf. 

Prompto swallowed hard and admitted to himself he didn’t really remember. 

“I wouldn’t have wanted to impose,” Prompto replied lamely, rather than point out that Mr. Leonis was... a very big man, it turned out. 

And Prompto was very much not. 

“Hn,” Ignis snorted to himself, but mercifully, did not ask for more detail. 

* * *

It was about four solid months since their arrival to Insomnia, when Prompto received a summons from the King. 

He was officially closer to seventeen than sixteen, and he didn’t get lost in the Citadel’s corridors anymore. Well, not daily, at least. He still split his time as evenly as he could, between Luna and Ravus, and the understated comfort of Ignis’ office. He still thought Insomnians were kind of really crazy, and he still felt terrible for it, because he knew it was unfair to judge them on propaganda. His Lucian was almost spotless, though he still had an accent and Ignis insisted on pointing it out every now and then, purely for the sake of flustering him. 

He woke up every morning and didn’t immediately feel certain something terrible was bound to happen during the course of the day. 

He was okay. 

They were okay. 

It was – probably – going to be okay. 

“You called for me, Your Majesty?” He asked, after knocking on the door and being gently commanded to enter. 

He found the King sitting on the edge of his desk, glass of amber liquid in one hand and a thoughtful expression on his face. He looked much younger than he probably was, though again, all Prompto had for a point of comparison was the Emperor himself. And the Emperor… well. 

“Yes, yes,” the King said, pushing off the desk to stand up straight, and though he was short, he did not look small in the least. “I did,” he said, with a placating smile on his face, as he left his glass on the desk and motioned Prompto to further come into the room. “I reckon it’s high time you and I had a proper chat.” 

Prompto opened his mouth to question this, and then swallowed hard and allowed his face to fall slack into serenity carved out of marble, when the King’s eyes glittered and he added: 

“...don’t we, Your Imperial Majesty?” 

* * *


	6. the king in mourning

* * *

_the king in mourning_

* * *

Regis thought, sometimes, of his wife. 

That was a lie, actually. He thought of her, always. She was a faithful ghost, looming over his shoulder, whispering advice with that straightforward, blunt way of hers that tolerated no nonsense, and which had, in time, rendered him solely at her mercy. 

He remembered her smile, wide and taunting, as she watched him struggle up a trail after her – she’d chosen the worst trail, just because he’d asked to follow her, he knew – spear resting on her shoulders, arms curled along its length, and the worst storm Regis had ever seen in his life raging all around them. He’d fallen in love with her, then. When he’d told her – as soon as he caught his breath back, lying on the soft grass atop the cliff she’d climbed to hunt and that he’d followed after because he was too stupid for his own good – she had laughed at him. Not the dainty, girlish laughter of the girls at court, but the full-blown mocking cackle after a good joke. She always laughed, when he said he loved her, at a little inside joke between her and the storm. It’d only made him love her more. 

Clarus had been outraged, of course. But Clarus was always outraged, about everything. 

Regis remembered asking Aulea to marry him, words stumbling awkwardly off his tongue, falling one after the other, like plates fumbling off his hands and shattering into the floor. She’d tried to kill him, for that. Then she’d challenged him to hunt a coeurl without magic or anything fancier than a spear, which was in essence trying to kill him again, just with less outright stabbing involved. He still had the scars from that, the star-shaped ghost of her spear tip on his back, because she had no remorse at all, and the web of lightning curling around his side, stretching almost to envelop him in the memory of the coeurl’s deadly embrace. 

They ached sweetly, his scars, on days like that, when he smiled and smiled and smiled, and no one but Cor ever noticed he meant none of them. It was cheating, that, from Cor. Smelling something was not at all the same as divining the shape of it, otherwise, and Regis knew better than to confuse the two. Cor knew the shape of his melancholy, but not the weight of it, and to tell him about it in detail was not something he could handle. Cor had spent long enough, having Kings dumping things on him that he couldn’t handle, for Regis to want to continue the thread. 

And, to be fair, he was struck, sometimes, by the idea that Aulea would have liked him, if she’d been allowed to meet him. 

Regis remembered her reaction to stories about Cor and what he’d become, after his disappearance into the Crag. He remembered her promising to hunt him, if given half the chance, and then laughing at the horrified look on Regis’ face. She’d laughed for days, after that, and then she’d taken him to a shrine, two weeks away from the village, deep into the jungle, and introduced him to a man who carried a coeurl inside his bones. 

When they came back, they had found Clarus and the Emperor of Niflheim waiting for him. 

Six months later – six months of Aulea ripping him apart, tearing his heart to shreds with the same ease she stripped a kill after a hunt – he was sailing to Accordo, to meet the Emperor in his winter palace and accept his offer to reclaim his throne. He hadn’t done it because he wanted power. He hadn’t done it because he craved vengeance for his father. 

He’d done it for the simple reason he wanted to live in a world where he could love his wife and hope to build a family one day, without anyone targeting him for the curses clinging to his blood. No ruler of Lucis would ever sleep safe at night, knowing he and his family existed, even if he was willing to live out his days in Galahd. If he wanted safety for his family – he’d known, the moment they’d sat on a mountain under the rain, and exchanged gifts, that he wanted a family – he’d need to make sure the ruler of Lucis never considered harming him or his own. And the only way he could do that, it turned out, was by becoming ruler of Lucis himself. 

He took the Emperor’s lessons to heart, his council and his ribbing, and fought the fights that needed fighting and signed the papers that needed signing. Six years, he spent weaving peace throughout his kingdom. Six years, he spent alone in his bed, with only the spear she’d gifted him in their wedding for company. Six years, he wondered if she lay alone at night, cradling the dead ring of his bloodline in her hands, and missed him even half as much he missed her. 

He had written her letters, every day. Some were long, winding rambles full of meandering thoughts and worries. Some were short, pointed, one sentence statements of the state of the world. But it didn’t matter, because she wrote him back, always. She didn’t write him about what life was, for her, because he knew her and he knew Galahd and life could only be going the same as it always went, in Galahd, and she was good at surviving that. Relished it, even. She didn’t write him about her feelings or lack thereof. She didn’t write about the weather or the politics or anything substantial at all. 

All she sent him back, once every week or so, was a line from a poem that usually took him an hour and a half to find the source of, and that often he didn’t quite understand the meaning of. But it didn’t matter. He had her words, crisp, sharp lines on a page, framed by emptiness all around, and that was all that mattered. 

And then, one day, after six years of poetry and war and diplomacy, her letters stopped. A week after, his own came back, unopened. Regis sent Clarus himself to find out what had happened, to track down the truth to its barebones, because he didn’t trust himself to go and actually come back after he learned it. And now he was needed, as King. Now people cared to have him around, and he’d wrapped leash after leash around his throat, becoming the worst kind of King there was: the sort that actually cared about his people. 

Clarus came back with a haunted look on his face and the weight of defeat on his shoulders, and Regis stopped him from reporting his findings for a whole month just so he would be composed enough to hear it. 

She’d been taken, the villagers had told Clarus, after weeks of hounding, by the storm. Already her – their – room had been torn down and burnt in a pyre, all earthly ghosts of her left with it. Regis had not cried, then, not with Clarus looking lost and sorry and about as miserable as he felt. Regis had finished his day – his appointments and his duties, feeling his neck strain under the weight of the circlet on his hair – and rather than going home, he’d gone to find Cor. Because Cor didn’t care about protocol or politics or consequences. Cor had taken one good look at him, standing in his doorway in the dead of night, and then he’d pulled him into a tight hug. Regis remembered clearly caving into grief, then, curled up on the floor of Cor’s cabin, drinking tea and sobbing like a child. 

Afterwards, he’d taken to visit Cor more often, precisely because Cor didn’t care one whit, about what was proper or not, for a King to say or do or think. Regis felt bad about it, sometimes, worried he was piling on his emotional turmoil onto his friend that way. That he was using him, after all, even though he’d long decreed to himself that Cor was not a thing to be used at the King’s leisure, no matter what his tenure under his father had led him to believe. He pandered to his conscience, instead, giving Cor everything that he wanted, and felt like a rightful heel for even trying to pay him for those precious hours by the lake, where he could speak up his mind without consequences. 

“It’ll be over, before spring,” Regis told Cor, lying against his side, half sunken in fur, as he held a fishing rod loosely in his hand. 

Cor did not reply, of course. Not that he couldn’t, even as a wolf – he had an uncanny ability to be eloquent, even without words – but because he never did. It was part of that strange, unspoken agreement they had, Cor and Regis: Regis would talk and talk and talk, and Cor would say nothing at all for all he listened to every word. Regis supposed he could achieve the same thing by sitting alone in the dark in his office, but in his office, no one was listening – or if they were, they were not welcome to. There was something eminently comforting, about having Cor listen to his rambling, aimless thoughts. 

“I used to like him, you know?” Regis said, after a moment, staring at the tip of the line sinking into the still waters of the lake. “Iedolas, I mean,” he added, shifting slightly against the warmth of Cor’s side. “Vardyger always presented him as the model of all I should aspire to be, to become King. For a while, I thought he might have liked me back, despite it all. But goes to show what I know.” 

Cor said nothing, of course, and Regis spent the next half hour slowly working himself up over the memory, crisp and sharp in his mind, like it’d been just yesterday, of the proud crown prince of Niflheim. How he used to stand behind his father, face serene regardless of the circumstances, looking down at Regis with fond pity as the Emperor pontificated at him for stretches of an hour and a half, about the nuances of kingship and command. Iedolas had been older, wiser than Regis felt capable of, having grown up with the kind of instruction Regis was only now learning he needed desperately to catch up on. If he’d thought it strange, that his father chose to do what he did, he’d been too well bred to voice the concern anywhere Regis might hear. Instead he looked on, listening but never joining in. 

Then, abruptly, Iedolas had gone home, barely four months into Regis’ tutelage under his father. He would not tell Regis why, looking grim and solemn and utterly alone. Vardyger would not explain his son’s sudden disappearance, either. It was only much, much later, with years upon his throne, that Regis learned the truth from Sylva. When her own crown sat on her brow and her mother’s vendetta against Regis’ blood no longer forbid her from speaking at all. Iedolas’ wife had been lost, fallen to some harrowing illness the like never seen in Lucis, that consumed the marrow of one’s bones. 

His son had survived the ordeal, born motherless and premature, but Iedolas could not bear to see him and had, instead, entrusted him to Tenebrae to care for as they saw fit. Regis tried to imagine abandoning one’s child like that and couldn’t fathom the reasoning behind it. His own wife was dead, stolen away by the storm she’d loved so much, and left him nothing but his own memories to remember her by. Sometimes, when the war weighted on his mind and he was feeling more bitter than sweet, he thought of the lengths he’d go, to treasure a child of his own blood. But it was not meant to be; he was to be Lucis’ Last King, the final period on that paragraph of history. 

They’d tried to make him remarry, of course. His Lords offering him their daughters, his Ladies offering themselves. He’d convinced them to heel and now they wanted to heel forever, to see his blood flow in another, and rest assured their place would be preserved. But Galahdians married once, for life, sworn to death and beyond. He’d sat in the storm and said the words and given the ring of his bloodline, dead and robbed of all power after his father had used it to shatter their crystal into dust. His wife was dead, but he was married still, and he would be married to her, until the day they buried him into the ground, clutching her spear and eagerly hoping to glimpse at her again, somewhere in the beyond. 

His thoughts had, invariably, returned to that child, as the war sparked into being and continued to worsen with each of Iedolas’ ludicrous demands for a crystal that no longer existed. Not in the political sense, even though he knew no one would believe him. No, he’d thought of that boy Sylva confessed kept in her care, abandoned and unacknowledged to the world, heir of nothing, son of no one, and pitied him the burden of his father’s madness. It was a burden Regis knew all too well, after all. And later, when he did think of him politically, Regis had spent ten solid minutes laughing alone in his office, as he realized what he was about to embark on, and what debt he was finally going to repay. Talking Sylva into it had been much easier, with that understanding clear in his mind. 

“It’ll be done soon,” Regis told Cor, standing up to reel back the empty lure. “And I’ll never be able to sleep again, with the knowledge of what I’ve done.” 

“Mors used to say the same,” Cor told him, startling him, suddenly sitting on the grass behind him, naked and shameless about it, legs folded up and arms curled around his ankles. He smiled wryly at Regis, face perpetually too young, like he was a shard of time forever caught in place, watching Regis walking further and further away, down the stream of time. “Said that’s how he knew he’d done the right thing.” Cor shrugged, voice quiet. “He always ended up sleeping, anyway.” 

“Peace bought with blood is hardly peaceful for those paying for it,” Regis said, lips twitching sideways into a lopsided frown. “Cor. Will you promise to kill me, should I ever go mad? To protect the world from me, if necessary?” 

Cor actually took a moment to think about it, before he shook his head slowly. 

“No.” 

Despite it all, Regis laughed. 

* * *

Prompto tended to pout, when he was frustrated. 

There was something to the gesture that made Regis chuckle every time he saw it. Most of his conversations with the boy ended up in conversational dead ends that frustrated him quite a bit, so Regis spent most of his time with the boy laughing softly under his breath. At some point, they’d need to work on smoothing that out; Emperors were not meant to have tells that obvious, after all. But Regis reckoned they had time, still. 

Just a little longer, for the boy to treat this as a _hypothetically_ , rather than an _eventually_. 

Just a little longer. 

“He makes everything difficult,” Prompto said, after he was done reading the minute for the latest council meeting. Regis privately enjoyed the thought of so many Lords and Ladies rolling in their graves, at the thought. “Why do you keep him around?” 

“Lord Mancipo enjoys contradicting everything I say and finding fault in everything I do, yes,” Regis agreed, eyebrows arched as he stirred sugar into his tea. “Purely because it is me who does or says so.” 

Prompto waited almost half a minute for him to continue, and when he realized he wasn’t going to, pouted rather spectacularly. 

“So get rid of him,” Prompto said, frowning. “Everything would flow much better if his vote wasn’t constantly slowing down the council’s sessions with ridiculously bigoted objections to basically everything ever.” 

“I could, of course,” Regis admitted, lips twitching into a half smile when Prompto’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. He was a smart boy, already mostly trained as far as diplomacy went, but unused to the notion of power on the scale he’d one day wield. One day, very soon. “But what do you reckon is the point of a council that never questions its King? And what do you think happens to Kings who only know how to deal with objections by force?” 

Prompto’s face colored slightly and he looked away, out of the spacious windows overlooking the Citadel’s courtyard, some fifty floors below. 

“I didn’t say to use force,” he muttered, frowning as he fiddled with the thin gold chain hanging of his neck. 

“Lord Mancipo has been Lord longer than I have been King,” Regis pointed out, amused at Prompto’s petulance, “do you reckon anything short of force would unseat him from his place?” Regis took pity on Prompto’s face and laughed. “Find those that oppose you most fervently, my boy. The ones who scheme and promise to stab you before you finish turning your back to them. The liars. The thieves. The vicious. Those who stand across the chasm of ideology and refuse to compromise. Those are the voices you need closest to you, always.” 

Prompto looked at Regis like he’d gone mad. 

“ _Why?_ ” 

“Because it’s one thing, to think you’re right just because the thought occurred to you, and quite another to be certain. And nothing will make you certain like defending your point from all manner of attack.” Regis shrugged lightly. “Consider it the first line of defense, if you will. Convincing those who already believe in you is nothing remarkable. But convincing those who hate you on principle? And more importantly, realizing you were wrong before you commit to a course of action? Invaluable.” Regis paused a moment, and then shrugged. “And it will come the time that they’re right and you’re not. And it will bite at your pride, harder than anything else you’ve ever felt before, the burning to be better. To not feel that way again.” 

Prompto sighed loudly. 

“Why do people _want_ to be rulers anyway?” He asked, with that faint shade of sarcasm that had taken Regis weeks to dig out of the pile of anxiety and nerves finely coated in polite deference. 

“Because they do not know what ruling means,” Regis answered, even if he knew Prompto wasn’t really looking for an answer. 

“Shouldn’t a requirement for this job be that you want it?” Prompto said, pout blooming once more with a vengeance. “I mean, isn’t it easier to rule because you want to, instead of because your life depends on it? Literally?” 

“Self-preservation is far nobler than common greed, I’ve found,” Regis replied, tone achingly dry. “I’d say you’re welcome to gamble on it, but you know it’s not just your life you’d be betting on that wager.” 

“I know, I know,” Prompto said, waving his hands defensively, shrinking back into his chair. “It’s just…” 

“Unfair?” Regis arched an eyebrow, leaning to fold his arms on his desk. 

“Massively,” Prompto snorted, and then sighed, shoulders slumping heavily. 

Regis smiled wryly. 

“It is,” he said, blunt and unrepentant, and shrugged when Prompto gave him a long, squinting look. “It’s the great unfairness of being born of who we were. We can only hope to make things fairer for those who’ll come after.” 

“Maybe I’ll be the last Emperor,” Prompto said, offering back a tentative smile, “just like you’ll be the last King. Maybe they can figure something else, once we’re gone.” 

“Maybe,” Regis admitted, shaking his head slightly, “but you’ll have to live long enough to convince them that’s the best way forward.” 

Prompto sighed again. 

* * *

“Have you come to gloat?” 

Titus Drautos was larger than life, in Regis’ humble opinion. He was tall, worn and scarred by far too many battles, but the thing Regis liked best about him was the spark of fury burning steady behind his eyes. Titus was honest and blunt, callous and unrepentant. He looked like a pale ghost, a halting brushstroke lying on the hospital bed, eyes sunken and expression somber. 

“If I wanted you dead,” Regis said, because it was the truth, sharp and poignant, just like Titus liked it, “you would be. How are you feeling?” 

“Better if I’d be allowed to go home,” Titus said, scowling up a storm. “I can’t keep losing this war for you, from here.” 

Regis snorted and didn’t try to hide it, acid and sincere. 

“I’m sure you can think of something,” he said, walking over to study the single tin box sitting on the sitting on the table across the room, where a window would normally be, if Titus hadn’t been poisoned in the Citadel and he weren’t under constant surveillance for his own safety. “You’re crafty like that.” 

“Not enough, it turns out,” Titus rasped out, shifting to sit up properly when it became obvious Regis wasn’t leaving just yet. “Caught the fucker who did this?” 

They had not. Not yet. The only reason Titus was alive was because Cor’s nose had caught a familiar whisper of death to him, though from what Regis had been told, the recovery was going to be slow and painful. Clarus and his wife had tried their best to trace the hand behind it, but whatever they had found, they were reluctant to share it with Regis until they were certain. Regis could only imagine what sort of reaction they expected him to have, or what a terrible secret they’d unveiled. He knew his crown was woven out of poison thorns, he was no stranger to that realization. And yet, Clarus feared what he’d do, if he knew what they’d tracked down. 

“The war might be over,” Regis said instead, ignoring Titus’ glower over the implications to his lack of answer, “before you’re released.” 

Titus went very, very still. 

“What have you done?” 

Regis smiled. 

“What needed doing,” he said, though the truth was far more complicated than Titus needed to know. 

Like the fact Cor had taken his Galahdians with him, four weeks prior, and had yet to come back. He’d gone from distraction on the frontlines, to outright crippling blows every other night. Clarus had been upset, of course. He knew better than to assume Regis had ordered Cor’s new strategy, and instead worried that Cor’s recklessness had finally won out in the end. 

Inside his mind, Regis puzzled over the sudden shift, though he admitted it seemed like the natural conclusion of Cor’s changes since he’d began to command their Galahdian forces. Regis remembered, months prior, Titus walking into his office and pulling him up by the lapels of his suit, high enough his feet barely touched the ground, and how he’d hissed at him, demanding to know how the fuck Regis had summoned his father’s pet demon from whatever hell it had gone to, after his death. It had been a revelation, that Cor would step outside his orders to preserve Titus’ life. 

“I didn’t know you and Cor had become friends,” Regis said, turning around to face Titus. 

Titus looked like he’d been kicked in the face by an angry chocobo. 

“We are not,” he ground out, teeth all but chirring against each other. 

“He saved your life,” Regis pointed out patiently, and snorted when Titus snarled silently. “And he seemed rather fond of you, given his concern over… the incident.” 

“I’m not fucking your pet,” he snapped, “if that’s what you’re asking.” 

Regis snorted. 

“That’s very pointedly not what I asked,” he said dryly, with the air of someone tired of walking down the same metaphorical road, “and I’ve told you before, it is hardly my concern if you were.” 

“Sure,” Titus said dubiously, squinting. 

Regis wondered why he was doomed to like people who squinted at him and doubted everything he said. 

“I just mean it’s no easy feat,” he said instead, “to court Cor’s friendship. He’s… complicated. Loyal, but complicated.” 

“We talk about tea, sometimes,” Titus said, irritated. “Which happens to be how I ended up in this bed, so pardon me if I don’t share your impressions on our supposed grand friendship.” Then he scowled. “Why are you here, Regis?” 

“Clearly for the pleasure of your company, of course,” Regis replied, wry smile tugging at his lips. “Can you believe no one has threatened to defect in days? I can barely go on.” 

Titus groaned, but agreed to a round of cards with little fuss – for him, anyway. Regis got fleeced, and very pointedly procrastinated telling Titus his voice was the voice Regis heard, in his head, whenever his conscience came calling. 

* * *

Over the years, Regis had gone through enough assassination attempts to no longer take them personally. He regretted the loss of life that came with them and the inevitable political knot that always followed: to identify the grave offense he’d committed to earn himself that sharp reminder that his throne was never truly his, lacking the crystal to consecrate it. 

He had yet to explain those to Prompto, but the boy was still too infirm on his belief that he should fight for his throne, once his father’s inevitable death came to pass. They’d talk long about it, the whys and the hows. Regis couldn’t help but feel a pang of something shapeless and indescribable bubbling in his gut, whenever Prompto spoke of his father in cold, indifferent tones. He remembered his own words, spat at Vardyger when the subject of his father’s assassination came up, full of anger and spite and broken love. Regis remembered, clearly, that once upon a time, long before his father had decided to shatter the crystal and damn the gods and their prophecy along with it, he’d used to love his father. He used to love Mors quiet, soothing voice, teaching him the right way to wrap wire into a lure, and the soft pride echoing in his words when he praised Regis for a job well done. In the end, confronted by the Emperor, he’d blown up in a spiral of emotion, most of it negative, sure, but emotion all the same. 

When Prompto spoke of his father, there was nothing there, just icy emptiness as vast and indifferent as the white plains surrounding the Glacian’s corpse. 

He hadn’t been upset, when Regis told him of the plot slowly closing in on his father’s throat, inexorable like a noose. He hadn’t argued or cried. He’d sat on an ornate chair that made his slender frame look even smaller than it was and listened with a resigned look on his face. He’d asked questions, but they were utilitarian and pragmatic to the point of being painful. He’d asked Regis if he was going to die, as well, as part of his plot to unseat Iedolas’ madness from his throne and stop the senseless war ravaging his lands. It had broken something in Regis, somewhere deep under his sternum, to hear the boy so bone-deep resigned about fate. 

No, Prompto was not yet ready to know how far resentment went, for those doomed to inherit thrones from mad kings. 

“Were you even planning to tell me?” Clarus asked, face pale and lips pulled tight at the corners, looming by the doorway. 

Regis finished folding his vest, ruined by the bloodstains, and carefully dropped it on the floor by the nearest corpse. 

“Not particularly, no,” Regis said, holding Clarus’ eyes stead as he snapped his fingers and the room erupted into a blaze all at once. 

“Regis-“ 

“Later, Clarus,” Regis said, stepping briskly past him as the fire died out almost as abruptly as it had begun, leaving nothing in its wake, “I promised Gladio lunch today, after all.” 

Clarus followed, because of course he did. He always followed. He always tried. He was the best man Regis knew, his poor Shield doomed to serve a doomed King. Regis promised himself to do something nice for him, and then threw his lighter down the stairs, warping down to the bottom to escape a lecture he’d long tired of. 

He enjoyed lunch, asked Gladio about school and very pointedly did not think of heirs and thrones for one long, blessed hour. 

* * *

Iedolas Aldercapt died on a chilly spring morning, with winter still clinging on despite the lack of snow. 

Regis knew within the hour. 

“No going back, now,” Wes told him across the line, tone flippant in that unique way of his, that was anything but. 

“Never did learn how to anyway,” Regis said, staring at the canopy above his bed, one arm folded behind his head. “Thank you, Wes.” 

“You can thank Camila,” Wes replied, and Regis could just imagine the shrug that went on with that tone, paint it perfectly inside his head. “In person, preferably.” 

“I’ll be ready,” Regis promised, “when the time comes.” 

He’d only just hung up, when Clarus burst in, to deliver the news. Regis loved him enough to muster the effort and pretend to be surprised. 

It wouldn’t do, after all, for Clarus to realize the kind of King he served. 


	7. fresh old scars

* * *

_fresh old scars_

* * *

“Once when we go back,” Cor said, standing naked at the edge of the haven, staring at the sun rising in the distance, “I don’t think we’ll go out again.” 

Behind him, he felt the stares of the others piercing his back, weighting his words. It was rare, after all, that he would shift back before they were ready to head back to Insomnia. But he’d known, as soon as he’d left, that they would not be heading back until it was done. And it was. 

It was. 

The Empire had retreated, bases and strongholds abandoned, even those they hadn’t reached in time to pick a fight. They were uncommunicated with the rest of the world, of course, keeping away from hunter hangouts and other settlements, without any means to know for sure. Cor was sure, anyway, that Regis’ gamble had paid out. When he’d explained his plan – sitting on the grass outside the cabin, toes wet with dew and a clover cigarette hanging off his hand – he’d told Cor only the vague strokes of it. Cor didn’t need to know the details, and Regis was too smart to repeat them out loud once he’d committed to them. All that mattered was that the Empire would collapse into civil war, once Regis’ hand finished doing rounds to Gralea and back, and by then the war with Lucis would be untenable. They would have no other option but to retreat. 

But for it to work, Regis had explained, he needed Cor to help. Cor and as many Galahdians the Isles were willing to spare them. Nyx had asked him, when they met, what terrible crime Cor had committed, to be saddled with the job of looking after them. He’d told him the truth – Cor always told the truth – all that had taken was Regis asking. 

He should be ecstatic, Cor thought, turning away from the glare of sunrise to study the group sitting around the fire. He’d served his King, at long last. He’d fulfilled his purpose, after all. 

Even at his worst, those last few months building up to the coup, when Mors sent him out expressly to run the streets of Insomnia and come back with blood dripping down his jowls. Even then, Cor had known that peculiar, quiet happiness that came with serving his King. Of having purpose and seeing it fulfilled. Nearly twenty years under Regis’ rule, and he’d finally been given the chance to be of use, but instead of the euphoria of a job well done, there was… something else. Something selfish and poignant and sad. 

“Cor,” Nyx said, after a moment, when no one else spoke. 

Cor shifted mid step and took off into the woods, away from the vague concern and the open arms waiting for him, but he couldn’t really run away from the treacherous thoughts clinging to the back of his head. 

* * *

The hardest thing, Cor found, upon their eventual return to Insomnia, was to sleep alone. 

Months had piled up, spent out in the wild, with warm bodies curled against his side for warmth, or curled up in the depths of Nyx’s bed, drunk out of his mind. A year and eleven months after first meeting them, Cor had delivered them back to the Citadel and refused the invite to stay. A month later, he found himself roaming a department store, head pulsing with a sleep-deprived migraine accented by the stench of humans in mass and went about buying a nicely sized pile of furs and blankets, because he reasoned it was the warmth he was missing, not the bed. Besides, it’d be hard to fit a proper bed in the cabin, anyway. 

The end result was a nest pressed against the single isle that served to separate the idea of a kitchen from the idea of everything else in the cabin, and after a week of experimenting, Cor found, to his annoyance, that his senses had misled him. 

He missed their smell the most, but he had no way of getting that, that wouldn’t be contradictory to his attempts to embrace normalcy again and avoid heartbreak all over. 

The war was over, after all. Cor had been there, standing by Regis’ back, during the announcement. The Emperor was dead and the Empire had collapsed into civil war as they fought to find a suitable replacement. Whoever Regis had chosen as replacement would emerge victorious, eventually, and obviously not resume the war with Lucis. Cor had seen to it, that the Empire was sent packing, and so he stood there, next to Titus – Titus, looking pale and withered, clutching a cane in his right hand to help keep himself upright, and Cor’s anger rolled lazy like the surf in Caem, in his gut – as they were given praise and titles and many new things Cor couldn’t force himself to care about. The Galahdians, too, they were given titles and praise for a mission none of the court even knew the truth about. 

They tried to look for him, to reach out. The ceremony took place two weeks after their return to Insomnia, and those had been two weeks of Cor keeping himself steadily away from them. They smelled ticked and hurt and Nyx had looked at Cor with eyes so heavy, all Cor could do was hide behind the King and refuse to see them. 

They would leave, of course. 

The war was over. Done. 

They were Regis’ tools to accomplish so, yes, but unlike Mors, Regis was not the sort to repurpose tools for war into tools for everything. Regis was going to send them home, and Cor knew it’d hurt him, when they went. It was childish, perhaps, to know he was hurting them now, with his insistence to stay away, but he knew they wouldn’t care, once they were the ones who left. It wouldn’t hurt them, to leave him behind. They were Galahdians, they lived in the here and now, he knew that much. He knew enough it hurt them, that he was wasting the last of their time together, when they’d much rather enjoy it. But he knew once they left, they’d forget him. It was childish, to want to hurt just because he did, and worse to give into it. But Cor had spent a month, now, trying and failing to sleep, he didn’t have any real desire to not be childish. 

“They’ll go, when they’re ready to go,” Regis told him, sitting at the edge of the lake, mud splattered all over his clothes – Clarus was going to have a fit, no doubt, but it meant something, for Cor, that Regis did these things anyway, regardless of Clarus’ thoughts about it. “Perhaps, when the time comes… you will go with them.” 

Regis fell squarely back into the muddled shore, when he lost the support of Cor’s side. Cor didn’t even laugh about that. He was standing by the edge where grass gave into mud and sand, around the lake, hands curled into fists and something vicious and sharp stuck in the back of his throat. 

“No.” 

“Cor,” Regis said, in that patient, soft voice of his, the one he only used with Cor, to offer him anything he wanted, so long as Cor didn’t ask for what he actually wanted. 

“No!” Cor snarled, and felt small, watching Regis stand up, mud and grime all over his clothes, smear along the side of his face, and in the back of his head, he could hear Clarus lecturing about it, about his tendency to defile and tarnish the dignity of the King. 

“When I found you, at Cid’s, I asked you what you wanted, and you asked me to let you stay with me,” Regis said, reaching out to pull him into his arms. “And I told you, you could stay as long as you wanted to. But they’ve made you happy in a way I couldn’t,” Regis went on, and held Cor in place when he twitched and tried to pull out of his arms, “and so very few things make you happy, Cor. I want to give you all of them.” 

“I’m happy here,” Cor said, certain it was the truth, even if he couldn’t make the words sound like it, hoarse and rasping against the roof of his mouth. “I _belong_ here.” 

Regis held his face in his hands, shrewd eyes looking right through him, and Cor commanded his eyes to dry and his expression to stop looking miserable. It didn’t work, not really, but Regis sat back down, and Cor sat with him. 

“Then you’ll stay,” Regis said, fingers tugging soothingly at the hair on the nape of Cor’s neck, and the gesture was familiar enough to let Cor collapse at his side, like he used to, all those years after Regis first found him after the Crag, cursed and hurt and unsure of what to do. 

Regis, Cor marveled, as the putrid thing in his chest finished leaking out his eyes, always knew how to make him feel better, no matter how lost or hurt he was. He ended up asleep, head pillowed against one of Regis’ thighs, and body loosely curled around him. 

This, after all, was what home meant. 

* * *

It got easier, sleeping, after Regis promised to not send him away. It still hurt to think about the Galahdians being gone – even though, to his knowledge, they hadn’t left yet – but it hurt infinitely less than the idea of being thrown from the only home he’d ever really known. It hurt less than the idea he’d failed his King, again, though Cor reckoned Regis wouldn’t see it that way. Regis was too good and too kind, to accept what sort of monster Cor really was, and deep down, Cor knew he loved him so much, precisely because of that. So long as he had Regis to go back to, their talks well into the night and their walks around the lake, everything would sort itself in the end. 

Sleeping meant, however, that he had to wake up one night, to someone desperately pounding at his door. Cor sat on the pile of furs he liked best for sleeping in, and stared at the door squinting, trying to place the smell on the other side. It was acrid with desperation, but it didn’t feel particularly threatening, so he found himself padding across the room to open the door. The door was unlocked, of course, because there was little point for that sort of thing where he lived, but he noted whoever was rapping so insistently at the wood, hadn’t bothered to try opening the door itself. 

“I’m so sorry,” Prompto said, staring up at Cor with wide eyes, hands immediately going to fidget with his sleeves, once he didn’t need them to knock, “I… I didn’t know who else to go to.” 

After a moment of consideration, he stepped back and allowed Prompto into the cabin. 

“The Crownsguard came and took Ig–a friend,” Prompto corrected himself, frowning, “they would not say why. We were in his study when they came, and he tried to talk to them, to find out what was wrong, and they… they just. Hit him over the head and dragged him away. Said he had resisted arrest.” Prompto stood in the middle of the room, hands shaking and eyes full of fear. “They’ve posted guards, outside the Prince and the Princess room, and they wouldn’t let me through. I tried to find the King, but when it looked like they were trying to lock me up too, I ran.” Prompto choked on a sob. “I just… ran.” 

Cor stood there, for a long moment, taking in Prompto’s story and making sense of the smells swirling like a storm all over the boy. Fear and anger, mostly, but also shame. He thought, long and hard, about what to do, about what it meant, that he’d come to him with this. 

“I’m sorry,” Prompto said, after a moment, composing himself enough that he no longer smelled of unshed tears. “I am so sorry, Marshal. This is… I should go. I panicked and didn’t think. This isn’t–“ 

“I’ll go with you,” Cor said after a moment, and turned to rummage around for clothes to wear. He didn’t have many of them, but he supposed any of them would do. “Prompto.” 

“You don’t have to,” Prompto whispered, shaking all over, all over again. 

“No,” Cor agreed, pulling a shirt over his head. “But I’d like to know what’s going on.” He paused, considering, and then added, as he slid on a pair of pants. “If your friend is innocent, I’ll have him released.” 

It wouldn’t be too hard, that. He had the rank to command such a thing, and of course, the nose to figure out without doubt, whether Prompto’s friend was guilty of whatever he was accused of. Then Cor let out a surprised huff, when Prompto latched onto him, thin arms clutching desperately at his middle, and very nearly toppled them both into the ground, with the force behind the hug. 

“Thank you,” Prompto said, as he clung on, “ _thank you_.” 

* * *

The Citadel was in chaos. 

Cor stood by the steps leading up the main entrance for nearly two minutes, trying to control the urge to burst out of his bones out of sheer self-preservation. He was entirely too familiar with the mixture of rage and treason stanching up the air and weighting down his lungs. He studiously did not think about Regis, and the fact Regis hadn’t called him. Perhaps, it was just an overreaction. People were lesser than Regis, after all. They could be making this into more than it actually was. 

It was relatively easy to get past the scrutiny of the lock down – the Citadel was in full lock down, Cor noted, and did not worry, did not wonder why the cellphone he carried solely so Regis could call him had not rung once tonight at all – once he introduced himself and pressed a hand into the fingerprint scanners. There had been a severe spike in fear all around them, once the Crownsguard recognized him for who he was, and the smell tug annoyingly at the back of his throat, but it was worth the speed doors opened and people pointed where he wanted to go. 

“Oh, you brought in our last straggler,” the woman in charge said, eyes pinning Prompto in place even as Prompto shrunk and cowered behind Cor. “Thank you, Marshal. We’ve already got a cell waiting for him.” 

Cor stared down at her, the stern tilt of her jaw and the meticulously groomed hair framing her face. 

“No,” Cor said, soft and blunt. 

The woman, Monica, Cor remembered after entirely too long racking his brain for the name, narrowed her eyes. 

“What?” 

“He’s not here to be arrested,” Cor said, sidestepping enough so she could see Prompto, who’d gone paler still. “He’s here with me, to free his friend.” 

“Sir,” Monica insisted, “Lord Amicita’s orders were explicit: to arrest and question any with ties to Lady Aurum, up to four degrees of separation.” 

“Why,” Cor asked, though it came out more a demand than anything else. 

That scope of orders was too wide, too ambitious, even for Clarus. Clarus, Cor knew, was the sort of person who knew how to be a person. He cared about truth and justice and doing the right thing. He wouldn’t order indiscriminate arrests without cause. 

Monica stared at Prompto dubiously for a moment, considering, and then walked the four steps necessary to close the door to the room, and flick a set of switches by it. 

“Lady Aurum has been accused of treason,” she said, pursing her lips and staring at Cor, as if expecting him to understand. “It has been discovered she conspired with the Emperor to sabotage the war and eventually crown her son as regent once Lucis was annexed.” She swallowed hard. “The King is… upset.” 

Cor reckoned he would be, considering Lady Aurum was his cousin, the last ghost of family left to him. Cor knew her only from the bits and pieces that Regis had told him about, having never actually met her in person. He remembered, that Regis had sound fond of her, when he talked about her. Like he cared about their shared blood. Like she mattered. 

“Lady Aurum has always wielded tremendous influence in the court,” Monica said, “the Crownsguard has been tasked with identifying who among them might have aided her treacherous plans. After careful consideration, Lord Amicitia determined the best way forward was to simply arrest those connected to her and interrogate them to ascertain their guilt.” She paused. “Or their innocence, if that’s the case.” 

“Ignis doesn’t have anything to do with this,” Prompto blurted out, “he wouldn’t… couldn’t do anything of the sort.” 

“Ignis?” Monica asked, eyebrows arched. “Ignis Scientia?” She snorted derisively. “Lady Aurum personally raised the boy, of course he’s involved in this. He hasn’t cracked yet, but we’ll make him.” 

“Prompto,” Cor said, to stop Prompto from bursting out whatever was sitting bitter and vicious on his tongue. Then, he turned to Monica. “Take me to him.” 

“Sir, I really don’t think-“ 

“I don’t care,” Cor said, shrugging. “Take me to him.” 

Monica looked like she’d swallow something sour, but after a moment, nodded tersely and reached for the door. 

“This way,” she said coldly, clearly angry. 

Cor paid her or her feelings no mind, though he did startle slightly, when he found Prompto’s hands wrapping around one of his, fingers clutching desperately. Cor let him, if nothing else, because there was nothing to the boy, that suggested he’d done something wrong. 

Monica led them through the labyrinth of basements deep beneath the Citadel, and as they walked further into the containment area, Cor was assaulted by memories of the previous King. He hadn’t been to this area of the Citadel in many, many years, and he found the familiar smells of blood and piss and fear and pain to be disquieting. They were a mixture he hadn’t smelled since Regis had sat on his throne and proclaimed himself King. 

“Iggy!” Prompto cried out, rushing past Monica when she opened a door that led to a small, square room, and threw himself at the figure crumpled haphazardly into a corner. 

Cor grabbed Monica’s arm and held her in place, when she stepped in to try and stop Prompto. She froze in place, and Cor reminded himself to loosen his hold so that her bones were no longer grinding under the pressure. 

“Ignis,” Cor said, letting go of Monica once he was sure she wasn’t going to try anything, and stepped into the room that smelled so keenly of misery and fear it made his head spin slightly. “Do you know why you’re here? What they accuse you of?” 

The boy in Prompto’s arms looked up at Cor with dull green eyes, huddling into the embrace for a moment, before he sat up straight, defiant. He had a split lip and an eye nearly swollen shut under a bruise. 

“Yes, sir,” he croaked, though Cor was struck by how little his voice actually shook around the words. 

“Are you guilty of any of it?” Cor asked, head tilted to the side. 

Ignis stared up at him, lips trembling. 

“Only…” he began, and then his body was wracked by a coughing fit, breathing uneven with the whisper of broken ribs. “Only of thinking fondly of my Lady, sir,” Ignis said, one hand clutching one of Prompto’s fiercely enough Cor was sure the imprint of his fingers would be left behind. “She was kind to me, sir, how could I not? But… but everything else. No. No, I knew nothing of it.” 

Cor stared at him for a long moment, forcing himself to unravel the cacophony of scents clinging to the boy. Ignis suffered through the scrutiny, holding as still as he could, eyes fixed on Cor’s. 

“Alright,” Cor said, nodding after a moment. “You’ll be leaving with us.” 

“Sir!” Monica spluttered, even as Ignis collapsed back into Prompto’s arms, “you can’t expect-“ 

“Yes,” Cor snapped back irritably, glaring down at her, “I can. I do. The boy is innocent.” 

“But-“ 

“Tell Lord Amicitia,” Cor said, after a moment, “that I’ll be interviewing the remaining prisoners in the morning. None of them are to be harmed further.” He paused, when she simply stared at him. “Go.” Monica bit her lips and then nodded sharply before storming down the corridor. Cor didn’t worry about what she’d tell Clarus, or what Clarus would do or say in reply. That could be dealt with later. “Prompto.” 

“He’s really hurt,” Prompto whispered, as Ignis labored to breath on his own, clutching to his side. “Marshal, I-“ 

Cor sighed and crossed the room in two steps. Pulling Ignis into his arms was as easy as anything, though Cor could have done without the renewed blow of panic assaulting his senses as Ignis went limp and meek in his arms. 

“Lead me,” Cor told Prompto, “back to where Luna and Ravus are.” 

Prompto swallowed hard and nodded once, resolute. 

“This way.” 

It took them almost an hour to reach the suite where the Tenebraean royalty was staying, even if Cor’s glare was all that was required to remove all obstacles in their way. Ravus looked shaken inside his own skin, pale and somber, while Lunafreya’s fury made Cor want to smile, for some reason. They guided Cor to one of the empty guestrooms of their quarters, where he finally placed Ignis on the bed as softy as he could. Prompto crawled into the bed from the other side, and went to curl against Ignis, holding his hand and muttering soothing words under his breath. 

“He needs a doctor,” Luna said, lips pressed into a thin, white line. 

“No,” Cor replied, frowning, and then simply pulled a hi-elixir from the depths of the armiger. He raised it above Ignis’ chest and crushed it until the sparkling green water spilled all over the boy. Ignis gasped and sat up so fast he nearly headbutted Prompto in the process. Cor turned to Ravus and Luna, as Prompto pulled Ignis into another tight hug. “Stay here.” 

“We already had no other choice,” Ravus pointed out, eyes narrowed as he glared at Cor. “What’s going on?” 

“Marshal?” Luna added, hands clenched into fists at her side. 

Madness, Cor did not tell them, though he had the certainty Regis would agree with him, once his own fury found its end. 

“I’ll come see you again,” he promised instead, stepping away, “once it’s over.” 

* * *

Clarus had yelled at him, of course, once Cor found him. 

Cor let him, until he was panting and tired and upset, and then snarled back at him and demanded to know which King he served: Mors, and his brutal justice, or Regis, and his hopes for a better way. It was a low blow, and Cor knew it even as the words escaped his mouth. 

“What would you have me do?” Clarus said after a moment, looking miserable and shrunk, too small for his own bones. “You don’t know what she’s like.” 

“No,” Cor said, because it was true. But then he added: “But I know what Regis is like.” 

Clarus didn’t have anything to argue that, so Monica was rather disgruntled when instructed to follow Cor’s recommendations to the letter, when it came to deal with the prisoners filling the Citadel’s dungeons near bursting point. It wasn’t how Cor envisioned his day going, to be fair, walking into tiny cells full of a carefully curated cocktail of despair that made his head spin, and asking questions to divine the truth out of their answers. 

But someone had to do it, and it might as well be him who did. 

“How?” Monica asked him, after the seventh time Cor declared someone guilty and summarily told Monica they could execute them at their leisure. “How do you know?” 

“It’s a gift,” Cor deadpanned sarcastically, rubbing his nose furiously onto his sleeve, because Monica didn’t need to know exactly how much of a curse it was. 

“But it’s… it’s almost like you’re smelling it on them,” she said, put out and accusatory, “you don’t even let them defend or explain themselves.” When Cor merely hummed at her, she frowned. “What if you’re wrong?” 

“I’m not,” Cor assured her, which only seemed to make her angrier still. 

Cor almost appreciated it, really. It was a constant pulse at his side, and it helped him reorient himself every time he crawled out of someone’s personal hell. He didn’t want to do this, honestly. He’d much rather be home and relearning how to be alone without air seeming to sink heavy and painful in his lungs. But someone had to do it. Someone had to make sure Regis didn’t spend months lying restless in his own bed, tormented by the thought of having hurt innocents in his quest to root out the traitors. Cor had a unique perspective on how terrible it was, to not be able to sleep when you wanted to, and he would do anything to save Regis the same pain. 

Besides, his cabin would still be there, when he was done. His solitude was not going to disappear, just because he did this. He knew where he belonged. 

Who knew, maybe after this, he would find he no longer minded being alone, after all. 

* * *

After sentencing four hundred and seven people to death, and releasing twice as many from captivity, Cor remembered he’d promised to go see Prompto and the others once he was done. He didn’t want to, to be honest. He wanted his furs and his warm floor and to maybe sleep for a small eternity, but he’d promised. He’d promised. 

“Cor.” 

Cor pressed himself against the back of the elevator, when the doors opened and he found himself staring at five familiar faces, wishing desperately he could disappear. 

“Oh, Puppy,” Crowe said, as they walked into the small space and Cor was assaulted by the soothing roll of their smell and the poignant lack of anger or fear or anything bitter in it. “What have they done to you?” 

Cor knew he shouldn’t. He knew. It would hurt worse, if he lingered on it now. They were going to leave, and he wasn’t, and even if he didn’t know how long it would take, before they did, he knew it would destroy him when they did. It would be smarter, to walk away now. Better. But then Nyx wrapped an arm around his shoulders, tugging him close against his side, and pressed his lips against the crown of Cor’s hair, and Cor felt himself cave in on himself. 

“We’ve got you,” Nyx said, and Cor buried his face into the crook of his neck, breathed in the clean scent of rain and him, and felt it fall on his abused senses like salve on a burn, “it’s okay.” 

It really, really wasn’t. 

**Author's Note:**

> Come hang out on [DW](https://notavodkashot.dreamwidth.org/) or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/notavodkashot), if you'd like.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Petrichor](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14371293) by [pan2fel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pan2fel/pseuds/pan2fel)




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